


The Incredible Tale of Dean Winchester and the Angel Who Fell From the Sky

by almadeamla, ibroketuesday



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-25
Updated: 2011-10-25
Packaged: 2017-10-24 23:15:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 33,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/268975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/almadeamla/pseuds/almadeamla, https://archiveofourown.org/users/ibroketuesday/pseuds/ibroketuesday
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Loose retelling of Gabriel García Márquez’s A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings, set in the Pacific Northwest of the late 1920s. Sam and Dean have retired young from hunting and moved to an island, and they're failing miserably in their attempt at being fishermen when a storm sends an angel crashing into their yard. Castiel is a feral creature with black wings and taloned feet, and though initially Dean regards him as a monster, the bond that develops between the two will set them against murderers, reveal a dark secret of angel society, and change both of them forever. Also, Castiel is naked the entire time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Incredible Tale of Dean Winchester and the Angel Who Fell From the Sky

**Author's Note:**

> Authors: ibroketuesday & xxamlaxx  
>  **Genre** : AU, gen  
>  **Pairing** : Dean & Cas friendship. No current pairing; past Dean/Cassie. Secondary characters include Sam, Lilith, Alastair, Kubrick, Cassie, Anna, Uriel, Balthazar, Gabriel, Lucifer, and Michael.  
>  **Rating** : R  
>  **Word Count** : 32,500  
>  **Warnings** : Violence, gore, character death
> 
> We'd like to thank our betas, and , and we'd also like to note that any mistakes that remain in this fic are 100% their fault. Much love goes out to our artist for the eleven pieces of gorgeous artwork.

[   
](http://pics.livejournal.com/whisperelmwood/pic/00029hxw)

[   
](http://pics.livejournal.com/whisperelmwood/pic/00029hxw)

[   
](http://pics.livejournal.com/whisperelmwood/pic/00029hxw)

In the year 1927, when he is twenty-six years old, with very little to his name aside from a wide assortment of pistols and no family except for his brother, Dean Winchester retires from hunting.

“I can’t do it anymore,” he tells Sam, feeling weak and broken-down, as they sit in a diner at two in the morning, ignoring their coffee. “I can’t. I’m sorry.”

“I know,” Sam says quietly. “It’s alright.”

They move to a small island off the coast, bristling with pine forests and rocky cliffs. Stacked on the eastern shore sits a little fishing village, the kind where cats run amok through the streets, a constant reek of fish hangs over the marketplace and boats jostle for space along the wharf. They disembark from _The Impala_ with a cartload of weapons and other hunting paraphernalia, including a huge cage meant to contain a werewolf, earning themselves a few suspicious glances as they pull the cart up to their house. They walk past little shops and houses and a church with its doors open, spilling light and sound into the street, holding a vigil for what a sign informs Dean is a missing child. The Campbell family owned a cottage here, though since there are no members of the Campbell family left, the deed passed to Dean and Sam’s father. The house has sat untouched since their mother’s death.

The house sits on the corner of two isolated dirt-packed roads, low and squat and narrow, with only one floor and four rooms, one of which is a kitchen that takes up a good third of the entire structure. The kitchen has windows in three walls that overlook the backyard, the side yard and the eastern street. A spiky iron fence with a single small gate separates the side yard from the eastern street, and the deep pine forest that backs the property has sent out rows of trees to border the fence guarding the backyard along the northern street, hiding it completely from the view of passersby. In its years of abandonment, the house and grounds have fallen into total dilapidation. They lug their cart into the side yard through the gate and Dean looks up at the house with its rotted roof and cracked windows and weather-warped walls and thinks that maybe here, he can start anew.

It takes all autumn and the majority of their savings to repair the damage time has wrought. Dean sleeps in a tiny room that overlooks the backyard with water dripping from the ceiling, clinking into the pots he set up on the floor. They chase out the raccoons who had made themselves at home, replace the rotten floorboards, purchase new furniture, and reshingle the roof. The rest of their money goes into buying fishing nets and crab traps. Dean lays a hand on _The Impala_ ’s sturdy wooden flank with a mixture of sadness and pride. His girl is old, but she gets the job done, every single time.

“Not the kind of life we’re used to living, girl,” he murmurs, and tosses a crab trap onto the deck. “But that isn't for us anymore. You’ll get used to it. And so will I.”

Sometimes the grief and the guilt weigh down too much, and Dean has to struggle to get out of bed. He’s always taken to being busy. He and Sam learn to fish.

The only problem, as the two of them quickly grow to understand, is that they make terrible fisherman. Even the crabs somehow know to avoid their traps. They spend the winter hunched cold and miserable on the deck of _The Impala_ , soaking from the spray and, frequently, the rain, and usually they bring home only enough to eat.

The start of spring brings no better luck. As Dean stows the day’s catch in the fish locker, Sam stands on deck, a dark silhouette against the sunset blooming orange and red. Dark clouds, glowing at the bottom like dying embers, are collecting above the horizon, and a sharp cold wind, bearing the first drizzles of rain, sends _The Impala_ ’s sail creaking back and forth. That night, the storm rages around the house; trees thrash their black arms and moan in the gale, and the sound of rain on the roof is like the stamping of a hundred boots. Dean lies in bed with an extra quilt and two pairs of socks on and watches his candle gutter in the chilly draft.

In the morning, a wet wind still howls strongly enough through the streets that he and Sam put off going out in the boat. Instead, they wrap up in long wool coats and venture outside to pick up debris from the yard. Beyond the fence, a kid is running in circles in the street, trying to get a canvas kite into the sky, where it flutters for a moment like a broken-winged bird under the flat white clouds and then comes crashing downward. He seems to be enjoying the stormy weather. The picture on their property isn’t so cheery. [The bottom of the werewolf cage, rooted in the mud in the backyard, has filled with water and dead leaves](http://pics.livejournal.com/whisperelmwood/pic/0002bb78). The yard is strewn with broken branches from the battered trees lining the back edge of their property. More branches litter the roof. Dean hefts a small one up from the grass, looks around at the mess in dismay, and hurls the branch into the forest.

“We just _got_ finished cleaning this place up,” he complains to Sam.

Sam shrugs apologetically. In the street, the kid whoops with joy as his kite leaps into the air.

The next storm brings down an angel.

*

Like all other children, Sam and Dean were raised knowing the exorcism chant, the power of holy water and salt, and ways to protect themselves from the thousand different creatures who haunt the night. But unlike most other children, their mother did more than hang crucifixes over the windows and line the doorways with salt. Until she died, Mary Winchester hunted what was out there. While Dean slept in his bedroom down the hall, a candle on the window sill in Sammy’s nursery flared with a sudden gust of wind and that flame jumped from the wick to the curtains. Dean doesn’t remember much, but he remembers smoke and heat and Sammy crying. He remembers carrying Sammy so careful down the stairs, one step at a time, and watching his first and only real home go up in flames.

After that, John Winchester went out and bought a small black sailboat, named it _The Impala_ , and chased monsters from coast to coast, up rivers, and around the back streets of port towns. He wanted to honor his wife’s legacy. Sam had his sea legs before he could talk much. And Dean learned life as an endless journey from horizon to horizon, over the blue waves. They never stayed anywhere too long.

Now, in the summer after his twenty-second birthday, Dean breathes in the salty Monterey breeze. The fog is hanging low over the bay, swirling thick, and there’s the sweet promise of sun behind it, yellow to pierce all the gray.

“I want you to have her.” Dad lays a hand flat on his shoulder, warm through the thin cotton of his shirt. “We can cover more ground this way, save more people. We can hunt on opposite coasts.”

He doesn’t know what to say. He’s dreamt of owning _The Impala_ for years, but the moment is tainted and poisoned black. This isn’t an affectionate gesture, a heartfelt gift. This is a parting present. This is his father’s goodbye.

“Dad, we can’t split up. Sam’ll come back. Just give him some time.” It’s the worst lie he’s ever told. Sam is gone. Traded in his sea legs and his guns for books and a room.

“This isn’t up for debate, Dean. Understand me?”

The sun finally splits through the clouds.

“Yes, sir.”

“Give Bobby a call from each port you stop at. That’ll be how we keep in touch.”

“Yes, sir,” he says, straightens his back, tightens his muscles under the weight that threatens to bring him crashing down. It feels like someone has placed an anchor in his chest and dropped him into the sea. He watches Dad head away from the dock. He watches Dad stare straight ahead without even a single glance back.

He watches until Dad is a distant speck on the horizon, two tiny white triangles against deep blue. Then he opens The Impala’s sails and heads out along the California coast. The gulls dance around him, flashing their backs and bellies to the sun. They act so happy to be free. It makes him wonder if somewhere off, hundreds of miles away, Sam has the same sensation of exhilaration. A formal education never did a hunter or a sailor any good. Sam had said maybe, maybe he’d come back, a new man, with a new view of the world, with knowledge he could really use in the day to day, and he’d still hunt as a side job, and they’d still be together. Brothers, hunting partners; family. Dean knows that the fancy diploma Sam is going to hang on his wall is going to keep them apart for the rest of their lives. Like the Grand Canyon rather than a sheet of paper.

Dean sets his sights on the East Coast, New York City, and he heads down south towards the Panama Canal. He makes some stops along the way, in Mexican coastal towns, looking for chupacabras or señoritas, stockpiling beans and rice and beer below deck. The sun always feels closer this far south and it tans him brown, bronzes his naked back, lightens his hair. He’s a new man on the outside, sun-kissed and healthy and whole.

It’s near three months before he reaches New York Harbor. He’s been hearing stories since Florida of something snatching children out of Harlem. Something with sharp teeth and green skin that drags them down into the sewers and spits up their bones. The Hudson River is smooth this late in the summer, the surface even. There are only a few small waves, lapping swells. Freshwater’s a nice change from the open sea. He’s not alone out here on the Hudson.

He’s not well received in Harlem. Everyone he tries to talk to shuts him out, walks away. More than a few times holy water gets splashed in his face, or people make him cross doorways he knows are lined with rock salt and silver before they’ll even permit him to speak. They don’t like his questions, the way he asks them, the fake police badge he carries in his pocket. Officers, people that look like him, don’t come to Harlem for good reasons.

“Nobody cared when it started,” Leticia Gordon tells him as she sweeps her front porch. Her two boys chase each other down the sidewalk. “Why did y’all start caring now?”

“I’m always going to care when there are children dying,” he says, but she’s not convinced, and she calls her boys to her. They run up the steps and hide behind her ankle-length skirt.

“Christo,” she says.

“I’m not a demon.”

“I don’t care. Don’t come back here.”

She shuts the door in his face, leaves her broom where it stands, leaning against the side of the building.

He has two dollars in his pocket and by the time the street lights come on he decides it’s time for a drink. He finds a bar, one filled with jazz music and cigarette smoke, men clustered around tables, waving cigars and glasses of whiskey as they chat. There are even a few women in the corner and he wonders, idly, how far he can stretch his money and make it last. He hasn’t been with a woman since Mexico, since he spent three days with Marisol in her hut on the beach.

Five dead children, three girls and two boys, all from the same three block area of Harlem. If it is in the sewers, he’s going to need a way to lure it out.

He saunters up to a looker, a woman with smooth skin and a sharp look about the eyes, who he thinks would provide a wild night.

“I just got into town; you wouldn’t happen to know of any place with affordable rooms, would you?” No lady likes to be propositioned to her face. Dean’s learned how to ease into it proper, slow. “I’m willing to pay up to ten cents.” He won’t tell her it to her face, because he does need to eat on occasion, but her for, he’d spend a quarter.

“Excuse me?” She glares at him, the meanest look Dean’s ever seen. “Did you just imply that I’m a whore?”

He swallows a mouthful of warm beer. How embarrassing. A few months at sea and his people skills go straight to hell.

“I never said the word ‘whore’.”

“Why would you _even_ \--” She’s so mad she stops mid-sentence. Sam used to do the same thing, before. Back when they were still talking.

“I'm sorry -- been at sea for months. I was looking for some company and you seemed like a woman I'd like to spend some time with.” She relaxes at that, just a little, and in spite of, or because of the righteous indignation, she looks absolutely beautiful. “I’m Dean Winchester and I’m sorry for implying that you were anything but a woman of virtue.”

He offers her his hand. She reluctantly and hesitantly shakes it.

“Cassandra Robinson. Everyone calls me Cassie.”

The name catches in his head, tugs something loose. A spark of recollection that lights a fire in his brain.

“ _The_ Cassandra Robinson?” He reaches across the bar for the newspaper folded into a neat square. There’s her name, first byline on the front page. He knew he wasn’t mistaken.

“You’ve heard of me?” She folds her arms, suspicious, and cocks her head.

“I’ve been following your articles in the paper.”

Her face brightens, just a bit, but the suspicion lingers.

“The one about the missing kids was my favorite," Dean continues, "real powerful. Sharp too, smart.”

She reaches into the bag slung across her shoulder. She pulls out a dainty silver flask and tips it over his drink. A slug of holy water dilutes his beer. He meets her eyes and downs it slow, swishes it around his mouth, makes a point.

“You read my writing? Really? Whites never read _our_ paper.”

“I had that guy over there read it to me.” He points to the corner, to the elderly man asleep with his cheek pressed to the table. “Nice voice on him, very soothing. Could do well on the radio.”

She hides a smile in the heel of her hand.

“I’m really sorry about the misunderstanding earlier. I’ve been sailing the last three months, I guess I forgot how to act around people.”

“Well.” She leans forward, chin in her hands. “Then you’d better practice.”

*

The storm blows in without warning; the third one in as many days. For hours there’s fog-smudged sky, a constant drizzle of rain, and then the fog is replaced by a dark, angry gray and a streak of lightning stretches overhead, followed by the slow roll of thunder, booming like a happy laugh, belly deep. Leaves and rain blow into the faces of the people gathered in Dean and Sam’s yard, and raindrops _plink, plink_ on the top of the werewolf cage.

“Time to go inside,” Dean yells over the roar of water and wind. “I’ll show you how to put a worm on a hook tomorrow.”

The children at his feet, the Kopeki boys and Jesse Warner’s daughter, stare up at him with disappointment hanging like water droplets on their faces.

“You heard me. Go home and get dry.” He wants to laugh as soon as he’d said it. There’s no getting dry on the island. You learn to live with the wet, with the moisture that gets into you, makes your bones swell like water logged wood and creak. The only time he’s ever truly dry these days is when he and Sam are miles out at sea. On days like that, he likes to take off his boots and lay his socks out on the deck, enjoy the bliss of warm, dry feet before the wood becomes too hot to touch his bare skin.

They look at him, devastated, like their entire world has suddenly been snatched away. Dean glances into the street. He doesn't like that they’d be walking home in the wet and dark.

“Please show us! We’re already wet.” Rebecca makes a very good point. It’s the only excuse he needs.

“Okay, you guys wait right here. I have to run into the house and grab a hook. Why don’t you dig in the mud and find me a big, juicy worm.”

He sets off towards the house, through the back door, and finds Sam oiling their lines at the table, fish hooks organized in front of him, in order of largest to smallest size.

“Are you coming in? We need to have the lines ready before we head out tomorrow. Salmon are going to start towards shore to spawn. We don’t want to waste any time once we hit the water.”

“I’ll be inside soon. I promised the kids I’d show them how to put a worm on a hook.”

Sam smiles, softens, irritation melting off his face.

“Here.” Sam tosses a hook to him. Dean catches it in one hand, almost pierces his palm.

“You wanna come too?”

“Nah, you—” Sam stops, line dangling from his fingers. The shrieks outside are not the wind. “Do you hear that?”

It takes him a moment to recognize the sound. He hasn’t been hunting in months. He almost managed to forget the noise of terrified screams mixed with something stranger, the cries of the things that hunt in the night.

He runs outside without stopping for a weapon. Sam’s close behind, a machete in each hand.

He gets out into the courtyard in time to see some great, winged creature come plummeting from the sky. It hits the ground, a thud of a solid body, something they can hurt and touch, and lifts its head.

[It’s like nothing Dean has seen in his life](http://pics.livejournal.com/whisperelmwood/pic/0002g8w5): a creature that would look like nothing more than a naked human, a man with tousled dark hair and blue eyes, except for the huge black wings bursting from its back and the curved, deadly claws on its hands and scaly feet. The thing thrashes on the ground, unable to get up for some reason, hissing in blind terror like an angry cat.

All three children stand frozen with the monster between them and the gate to the street, too far to grab as Dean lunges out the door. And then little Ronald makes a break for it.

Dean realizes what is about to happen, but he can’t stop it.

The creature sees the kid coming and its leg lashes out in a wide arc and its talons catch Ronald where his body has no protection aside from a meager layer of tissue and fat. Ronald’s mouth hangs open, pain and surprise, and he falls back as his insides spill out his front.

Dean shoves Rebecca and Carl towards the house and runs to Ronald, presses his hands to the boy’s torn belly and blood bubbles up like boiling water from an underground spring. Intestines are slippery beneath his fingers, long, steaming pink and gray coils that smell of shit and bile. The child has been gutted, split clean open by razor-sharp claws. The odor is horrible and wisps of heat rise white then fade into the cold air.

In the middle of their small yard, the creature flops and thrashes its wings. The right is crooked, twisted, bent unnaturally in the middle. The wing is broken and on any other animal it would be a pitiful sight. Dean finds it hard to feel even a modicum of compassion when the wing is spattered red with a child’s blood.

“Sam!” He can’t move, can’t attack, his hands are covered in gore. He’s all that’s holding little Ronald together. He’s the only one trying to push Ronald’s guts back in. They aren’t too dirty. Things might just be okay. A little water, some soap, and Ronald will be back learning how to bait a fish in no time.

Sam charges at the creature, head down, arms extended, shoulders forward, machetes abandoned on the ground. Sam hits it hard enough to send it backwards, rolling once. He gets the thing screeching, disoriented, knocks it around the corner of the house out of the side yard and into the back, and another tackle has it sprawling into the werewolf cage. Sam’s in hunter mode again, crunches the tip of a wing beneath his boot to keep the animal back and then swings the door shut. The cage clangs as it locks. The beast throws itself against the bars and tries to flap its bloody, mud-matted and battered wings.

“Sam,” he says, fast as he can, over and over. Sam’s panting hard and blinking, focused on the strange thing they’ve managed to trap. “Go get the doctor, tell him to hurry. Tell him I put them back in--”

“He’s dead, Dean.”

Of course he is. Around Dean the dirt is sodden with water and blood. The earth is rich red close to the body and the surrounding area is pink. He should know that Ronald is dead. He’s been through this before.

“I have to go get Carl, take him to his mother.” There is blood puddled around his knees, and Ronald’s skin is starting to get cold. There’s nothing anyone can do now.

“I’ll get her,” Sam says, staring at the mess on Dean’s hands and chest. “Clean up; go inside with the other two. Don’t let them see the body.”

Dean nods mutely. The family shouldn’t see this. He remembers the smell of that room. He still has nightmares about it, dreams that even whiskey can’t keep away.

He finds the needle and thread he uses to sew up holes in their sails and canvas. The thread is thick, too coarse for flesh, and it stands out stark black against the whiteness of Ronald’s belly. Since the cut was so clean it is easy to stitch and when Dean finishes, the only evidence of any injury is the stretch of dark thread eight inches long and the tear in Ronald’s shirt. He gathers Ronald up in his arms and carries him around to the front door so he won't have to take the body past the kids. He wraps Ronald in an old blanket and puts him in his bedroom before he joins Rebecca and Carl. They’re huddled together in the kitchen, underneath Sam’s blanket.

“Where’s my brother?” Carl asks, quiet, though Dean thinks he already knows.

He takes a seat at the table. Rebecca and Carl both come and crawl into his lap.

“Your mother is on her way,” is all he can say to Carl, arms around the kids, holding them close.

From the house he can hear the creature shriek and hurl itself against the bars of the cage through the thunder and the rain. He reminds himself the cage is made of the strongest metal in the country, and there’s no way anything locked inside it is ever getting out.

Each time the animal cries, Rebecca shivers and Carl curls his hand tighter in Dean’s shirt.

“Don’t worry,” he says, listening for the sound of Sam’s footsteps, the wail of Mrs. Kopeki’s grief, and as the sound fills his imagination he hates himself with a sudden vicious intensity for once again failing to protect. But for now, there’s only the scrape of claws on iron, gulls crying as they soar over the stormy sea. “It can’t hurt you.”

*

“When I was a little girl,” Cassie says, following the words with a long drink of wine, red dripping from the mouth of the bottle, down her wool covered fingertips, dropping like blood into the snow. “I always wanted to go see the circus. I remember it came to our town once. I was six and I begged my parents to take me. I’d see the other girls, the white girls, leaving their houses in their prettiest dresses. They always came back smiling. I wanted to have that. The last day it was in town, my momma tried to take me. She thought, maybe, if she hid my hair in a bonnet and dressed me in clothes real dark, that I’d be able to go. My daddy told her there was no point.”

He takes in the tight press of her lips together, the distant, distinct look of sadness in her eyes. He wants to hurt the people who denied her anything.

The New York winter blanketed everything in white, and they’ve folded a blanket on the wet stone of a bench hastily cleared of snow. From the hilltop, they can see the lights of the circus twinkling around the huge tents set up in the park below. Occasionally, roars of approval or screams of awe drift up through the darkness to where Dean and Cassie sit, gloved hands curled together.

“I’ve been to the circus,” Dean slurs. He’s had more than his fair share of the bottle -- alright, two bottles -- of wine, and he’s more than a little drunk. “It’s not so great. Bunch of animals dressed up in silly foofaraw.”

“Sometimes,” Cassie says with a sly and slightly intoxicated wink, “you want to see the foofaraw for yourself.”

“Well, I will show _you_ foofaraw!” Dean leaps up, stumbles a bit in the snow, and then puffs out his chest like the ringmaster he saw at the circus Dad took him and Sammy to in Chicago when Dean was twelve. “Step up, little lady, if you dare to see the wonders of the Great Circus of the -- of the Great Dean!”

He risks a look at Cassie to see if he should be embarrassed, but she’s laughing delightedly, hands pressed to her mouth.

“Go on, Great Dean,” she tells him, with the strained voice of forced solemnity. “Show me the wonders.”

“For one, we have an amazing dancing bear. You there, bear!” he shouts at a lump of snow, stumbling, snow crunching beneath his sturdy boots. “Dance on that ball for the pretty lady!” He cracks his imaginary whip. He can almost hear it, though, the snap of leather in a room awed into silence.

“My word,” Cassie gasps, a gloved hand to her chest. “That bear is remarkably talented.”

“You’ve no idea what I went through to train it.” He holds his arm to his waist, bends himself over for a wobbly bow. “Months of discipline.”

“What else do you have in store for me, Great Dean?” She giggles, eyes wide, and he can almost see the little girl underneath, clad in her best Sunday dress and bonnet, holding both her parents by the hand.

“Now, for your pleasure, we have a lion, who has -- eaten remarkably few trainers in his time, and destroyed only fifteen chairs.” He flings a finger at a low-hanging, snow-laden branch. “Look, the lion is going to jump through the flaming ring of fire!”

Instead of leaving this one to the imagination, Dean takes a running jump at the tree as Cassie shrieks with laughter behind him. He leaps off the ground, smacks into the branch, and collapses into a snow drift, the wind knocked out of him. The last thing he hears before the snow slides off the tree and buries him is Cassie’s helpless laughter.

Cassie lifts him off the ground and brushes snow out of his hair and off his clothes. She presses a soft kiss to his lips, and whispers, almost too quietly to hear, “I love you, the Great Dean.” His heart stutters painfully in his chest. He mouths it back to her.

*

Soon as the storm clears, Dean loads the shotgun and heads out into the chill evening light.

The creature tries to attack him through the bars of the cage. It bares sharpish teeth at him. Its face, below wind-blown tufts of black hair, is human, but its expression could never be taken for anything but feral. The yellow scales on its feet, with four long rough toes on each like an eagle’s, trail up to its knees before smoothing into skin. The mud and grime at the bottom of the cage do little to conceal the long, wicked talons that taper off each toe. Its wings, rich with glossy black feathers, arch behind it aggressively as far as they can in the cage; Dean guesses at a wingspan of fifteen feet when they’re fully extended, and the beast can’t open them all the way in this confined space. The fractured bone has already sunk into the long red gash on the injured wing. It must be a phenomenally fast healer. Dean steps closer to the cage. Each hand has vicious little claws curving off the fingers where a human’s fingernails would be, and these lash out at Dean now, almost catching the buttons on his coat. He wonders how it would kill someone his size, if it would try to gut him or aim for his throat, carry him a thousand feet up and drop him, eat his remnant splattered on the earth. He’s never going to find out. Some things in the world don’t deserve to live. This is one of them.

“Wait, Dean!” Sam comes trotting toward him, cheeks flushed above the collar of his coat. He puts his hand in front of the barrel of the shotgun. Dean lets the trigger go. “Do you have any idea what that is?”

“I don’t care unless it means there’s a special way to kill it.” The creature doesn’t look like anything special, just an unfortunate mix of man and bird. A freak of nature, a mistake spawned in the beginning of the world. Familiar, too, in a way he doesn’t want to admit.

“I think it’s an angel,” Sam says, and the words are powerful enough, stunning enough, to get Dean to lower his gun.

“Angels aren’t real.” He remembers the stories his mother used to tell him about the angels, their strength and beauty, the pearl and ivory color of their massive wings before the fall. God’s first creatures, and therefore the closest to him. The memories are fragmented, bits and snatches, but the beings in her stories couldn’t have possibly looked like this. There’s nothing elegant or mysterious about this beast.

“Look.” Sam shows him a page from their father’s journal. There’s a small sketch in the right corner, of a creature similar to this, a man with feathers and enormous wings. Angels are listed in the journal as a legend, because for all the things Dad believed in, God and fairytales were the two he ignored. “You can’t deny the similarities. There have been sightings of this kind of creature in this area for years. 1902, a farmer just a little way down the coast--”

“Sam--” Dean sighs in frustration and runs a hand through his hair. In the cage behind him, the creature paces behind its bars, watching them with a wild, glittering intelligence. “Angels are just a story, a myth. Something for parents to tell their kids at night to help them go to sleep. If Dad put that down, it’s because maybe there’s some monster out there that gets mistaken for an angel.”

“Maybe.” Sam pauses, at a loss for words. “But maybe they are real. Maybe the legend of the angels isn’t true, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. There’s usually some kind of factual basis to mythology. I think this thing is it, the real thing that gets called an angel.”

Dean barely restrains himself from rolling his eyes.

“You want it to be an angel? Fine, Sam, it’s an angel, and I’m going to kill it. So get out of the fucking way.”

Sam steps back, moves his hand.

Dean fires into the cage until he’s out of shotgun shells.

The angel crouches in its cage, riddled with holes, missing giant hunks of flesh. There are pieces of its wings gone, a chunk of torso, a portion of its chin. Its blood is red, same as Dean’s, same as anyone’s. The angel had curled up into a ball under the barrage, and force of the shots had barely made it twitch, had elicited no cries of pain. He waits for it to slide to the floor of its cage dead. Instead, it throws itself at the bars as quick as an eyeblink and swipes its claws at him. Dean leaps out of the way, and then a moment later yanks Sam back as the angel slashes at him too. Its teeth are bared. It looks so angry it's almost growling.That sharp hand comes at them through the bars a few more times before the angel gives up its hope of reaching them and sets to licking the wounds that it can reach.

Sam and Dean stand for a moment in the watery red sunlight. Dean’s fingers feel numb and icy on the trigger of his useless gun.

“You can’t kill an angel, Dean.”

“Then what the hell are we supposed to do with it?” He wants to go load his shotgun again. He thinks maybe if he kept firing, a steady barrage of shells, he could turn it to mush and pieces. There would be no recovering from that. But as though Sam has read his thoughts, he takes the shotgun out of Dean’s hand and casts him a _look_.

“I have an idea.”

*

Sam doesn't have any memories of their mother – he was too young when she died. Dean, though, was old enough to remember a few things. He remembers her hair, her smell, her laughter as they played together. And he remembers the stories she'd tell him about the angels.

In the beginning, the legend goes, the world was dark, and cold, and covered with an empty sea. No living thing moved in the black waters. The only things that lived were the angels. Their wings were white, and shone brightly, for angels were the first stars. They flew through the darkness, over the wide, wide sea, always searching for a place to land, and always finding only water. They flew without rest for a long time. They grew very tired, and wanted to sleep.

When the first land rose from the water, God put on it good plants, and animals, and the first human beings, to whom he had given dominion of all things. There was peace there, for a time. Then the angels saw the light of our forefathers' fires in the night, and saw the good things God had given us. They were very tired and very hungry and wanted it all for themselves. The angels pushed many of the first of us into the sea and ate the plants and animals. We could swim like fish back then, and stayed afloat until we noticed that the angels, being feathered creatures, kept far away from the fires. We crept back up to the ruins of their village and burned the angels' wings. This is why, today, angels have wings as black as the crow's.

God came down and was very angry. He said to the angels, “You have destroyed all I have given humankind to own. Why have you done this?” The angels said they had wanted rest, and food. God said to the angels, “You have done an evil thing. You will fly over the sea forever, and you will never dare to come near land. To make sure, I will plant in the soil black flowers that will kill you at a touch.” However, God took mercy on the angels, and he gave them their own small piece of land far out at sea, and put fish in the water for them to eat. To our ancestors, God said, “Why did you not ask for my help? You have shown yourselves to be violent and rageful. From now on, you must stay on land; you will be poor swimmers, and the sea will greet you with storms and high waves.”

Because the angels' wings had gone black, God made new stars and fixed them in the sky. The constellations became guides to the angels and brought them to their home beyond the horizon, where they have stayed ever since.

“But not all angels are bad,” Mary would finish, smoothing back the hair on Dean's forehead. “Just like we humans can be both good and bad. When I was little, just like you” (and here she would tweak Dean's nose) “and I was lost in the woods, an angel came down from the sky. He fed me and kept me warm until the sheriff and his deputies found me. I gave him my locket to thank him.”

Dean had heard his mother's story about the angel many times. “It's really lucky to see an angel, right?”

Mary smiled down at him. “Yes. Not many people do.”

“But I thought God said the angels couldn't come to land,” Dean mumbled. He was drifting off into sleep.

“Well, maybe this angel made an exception.” Mary leaned down and pressed a long kiss to Dean's forehead as his eyes drooped closed. “After all, what could be more precious to God than a child?”

*

People are knocking at their front door as soon as there is a trace of light in the morning sky. The stars haven’t even completely faded away and already half the village is clustered together, bundled up against the drizzling rain. A smaller crowd has swarmed around the fence that sequesters off their side yard, peering through it in attempt to see the angel in the back. Dean’s disgusted with all of them. Ronald Kopeki isn’t even in his grave and they’re lining up to get a glimpse of the monster that killed him.

“I heard about what happened to the Kopeki boy,” Mayor Kubrick says, straightening his tie. His blue eyes are dark, serious, crackling with curiosity, like candles bobbing in the water. “Tragic.”

“Yes.” He nods, and he can still smell intestines and see the blood. “It was awful.”

“I also hear—” Mayor Kubrick pauses, carefully puts together his next string of words. “That it was an angel that killed him. An angel that you caught.”

“We have it right out back.” Sam wedges his foot against the door to keep Kubrick from shoving it open and slipping inside. “And you can see it if you want to. But you have to pay. Capturing it took some considerable effort. It’s a dangerous animal.”

Kubrick doesn’t even have the decency to fake hesitation. He nods and pulls a handful of dimes from his pocket, deposits them into Sam’s open hand.

“I want to be alone with it.” Kubrick gives Sam another coin, this one a quarter. “Keep everyone else back.”

“Whatever you say,” Sam says, moving aside to let Kubrick in the door, through their sad, creaky house. As he passes into the kitchen, Dean grabs Sam.

"We're charging people to see it?" he hisses.

Sam shrugs off his hand. "I thought we could give some of the money to Mrs. Kopeki. Or take a break from fishing for a day. Look, we've got the angel anyway, why not use it?"

They follow Kubrick into the backyard.

Kubrick takes one look at the angel, wings with impressive, gleaming feathers, and falls to his knees. He removes his miniature Bible from his front pocket, kisses the cross embroidered in with golden thread. He starts to pray, head bowed, nose and lips against his Bible. Dean doesn’t know why he even bothers. If this is an angel, then angels are only animals, creatures, no different from the raccoons that scurry across their roofs or the fish that swim in the sea. They aren’t God’s first creatures. They’re no fallen stars.

The angel snarls and reaches for Kubrick through the bars of the cage. Its clawed fingers move wildly. Its shotgun wounds leak pus and blood.

“Watch out.” He pulls Kubrick away. “It’ll get its claws into you if you give it the chance.”

Kubrick leaves once he’s finished praying, a stray feather from the angel tucked inside his Bible as a place marker. Unattached to the angel, the feather looks as though it could have come from a giant crow. Nothing special.

The line outside their door stretches, winding like a crooked snake, through their gate and into the street, past the first row of houses. There’s no traffic on the road, no children playing in the gutters. Everyone is in line, waiting, coins jingling in a pocket or a purse. Life in the village has slowed to a crawl, all because of the angel screeching in the courtyard.

Sam’s the best with figures of the two of them. He stays at the gate to the side yard, handling the money, adjusting the price. Children are a dime, adults a quarter. That leaves Dean with the task of handling the angel, keeping the people who decide they’re going to try and pet it back. The first six children that come to see it, he makes stand a good five feet from the cage. He keeps remembering, the sight and smell of so much blood, the damage the angel’s talons can do, and their mere presence fills him with anxiety.

By late afternoon, the courtyard is a mess. The mud is full of footprints, bits of trash, scraps of food. Peanuts are strewn across the ground in front of the angel’s cage. One of the kids had thrown them at the angel, hoping it would catch them in its mouth or do some sort of trick. The angel had just sat there, head tucked under its wing; a disappointment.

*

Dean’s father didn’t give him too many things. He gave him a lot of what counted: the knowledge of how to handle a gun, the best ways to kill a thousand different types of creatures from here to nowhere, a legacy to carry, and, of course, _The Impala_ , which is more than just a material thing. But in terms of hand-me-downs or Christmas presents, John didn’t much see the point. Which is perhaps why Dean, despite not being a smoking man, values [the lighter](http://pics.livejournal.com/whisperelmwood/pic/0002c9cw) too much.

John got the lighter shortly after Dean turned twenty-two, the first and last job they took together after Sam skipped out. They were working a job for one of the last remaining members of the dwindling Winchester line, a cousin who lives with a “friend” in the mountains of Kentucky. They got rid of the poltergeist who’d been scaring away customers in the friend’s general store and in return he gave them a lighter, one of the new types, in silver, and carved the name _Winchester_ in curlicue along the bottom. Dean, who at that point was having difficulty sleeping without Sam breathing in the bed opposite, coveted the lighter immediately. He liked the idea of a thing that bore the name shared by all of them, a gift that could be passed between John and Sam and Dean and belong to all of them at once. The Winchesters were a clan of farmers who stubbornly raised wheat on land only good for growing bones. There weren’t too many family heirlooms passed through the generations. The lighter is the heirloom passed from John to Dean, given to him right before _The Impala_ , on the last day Dean would ever see his father.

On the island, Dean carries the lighter in his breast pocket. There’s little use for it in their new lives, where the most Dean uses it for is getting fires going inside, but keeping it with him is an old habit, one hard to break. The lighter saved his and Sam’s life in an underground cave in Utah when it produced just enough light, a tiny flicker of orange, allowing them to find their guns lost among the skulls, femurs, ulnas, crumbled along the floor. Dean isn't fit for that kind of work anymore but something in him hesitates at setting all the memories aside.

Dean bends to pick up a roll of canvas. The recent storms have blown debris into _The Impala_ ’s sail and it needs to be patched before the ship can move. As he leans over to hoist the material over his shoulder, the front pocket of his shirt falls open, and the lighter tumbles, drawn by gravity, out and into the folds of a rope coiled along the edge of the wharf. The lighter doesn’t even make a noise as it plops onto the ground. And because of that, Dean doesn’t notice the lightness in his pocket. He’s focused on the weight balanced on his shoulder, on Sam calling to him from the dock where _The Impala_ is moored.

The lighter doesn’t sit there long.

Darlene Lupon, eleven years old, sees the silver shining on her way to the market, eight brothers and sisters walking single file behind her, another sibling balanced on her hip. She wipes the mud from the lighter’s surface and sees a new source of income, something to supplement the money her father, a coal miner on the mainland sends home, smudged black in the corners, and something to light fires with at night to keep her mother, dying of consumption, warm until a buyer for the trinket can be located. She glances around to make sure no one’s watching and pockets the lighter. She’ll say a prayer, later, over the little book of prayers and psalms her mother made for her, and ask the Lord forgiveness for the theft.

Days later, Dean will pat at his pocket and find it empty, and assume the lighter fell into the sea.

*

Dean gathers up the remnants of their dinner. Half a chicken cooked straight on the fire and a pot of rice heated on their wood stove. There’s a little meat left on the bones of the chicken, a thick layer of burnt rice crusted to the bottom of the pan. It’s not much, but animals aren’t picky. Until they have enough money to properly feed it, the angel will take what it can get. Meat is expensive and their fishing only brings in enough to keep him and Sam from starving at best.

The angel watches him through the bars of the cage, feathers on end. Its teeth are bared in a vicious snarl, claws aimed at his throat and heart.

“Get back!” He picks up a piece of wood blown into their yard by the storm and bangs it against the cage. The noise and vibrations make the angel retreat to the far corner of the cage and wrap itself in its black wings.

Dean eases the pot between the bars.

The angel is on him the instant his hand is inside the cage. It grips his wrist, claws piercing through his skin, through his _bones_ and it tries to pull him in, pull him through. Dean’s jerked against the unyielding metal as something in his shoulder tears and wrenches loose and the bones in his forearm snap clean in two. The pain is white hot, like lightning mixed with fire that travels from his fingertips on up.

He’s so sure the angel is going to kill him. It’s going to rip his arm clean from his body and eat it while Dean bleeds to death in the dirt. After his utter failure at protecting Ronald, this is exactly what he deserves.

The angel lets him go, then, in favor of inspecting the food, and Dean collapses to the ground. It eats the chicken first, bones and all, breaking them in half to suck out the marrow. It licks up the rice, ravenous. Dean would almost feel bad for starving it if it he could feel anything other than his own agony. The muscles in his broken arm are spasming, trembling, and each involuntary movement grinds together little pieces of his splintered bones. He’s lightheaded, nauseous, seconds away from blacking out, in too much pain to even scream.

The angel sits and picks rice out of its feathers, brings the individual grains to its mouth. It looks undeniably pleased, mouth curled into something resembling a smile.

When he comes to, he’s lying in his bed, and his arm is a pulsing, carefully bandaged lightning rod of pain.

“You’re an idiot,” Sam says from where he’s sitting at Dean’s feet. Dean’s boots are off. His toes are wet and cold. “You could have lost your arm.”

“I’ve lost worse,” he whispers, and saying something like that to Sam is a terrible kind of cruel. He turns his head to stare at the crude pine wall and glinting window. He’s not the only one dealing with such a crushing loss. It only feels that way. Sam lost Dabir and Cassie too.

“I know things are hard right now.” Sam puts a hand on the lump his leg forms under the quilt. “But they’re going to get better. That’s why we came out here. For a new start. This angel will give us that. I just want you to be happy.”

Dean swallows around the guilt that lives in his throat and doesn’t respond.

“Get some rest.” Sam covers him with a quilt, touches the back of his hand to Dean’s head, checking for a fever. With his arm so badly broken, there’s the danger of infection settling in and rotting him to his core.

He leans away from the warmth of Sam’s hand, listens to the sounds of the angel rattling in its cage.

*

Sam twists the knob on the radio. The speakers hiss, click, announcer’s words stretched high and thin as they pierce through the crackling static. Sam works with the dials a few moments longer, until the voice is nearly coming in clear, save for the occasional drop of a phrase or word. Over the kitchen counter, the night presses black and thick against the windows, lashed with rain.

Dean cuts the head off a salmon with his usable hand, pulls out the bones. Then he does the same to a chicken he bought in the market. His mind focused on the task of preparing the angel some kind of meal, he’s only half listening to the weekly news.

“--I’m sorry to report--” A high pitched hum, then the voice returns. “--has gone missing. She was last seen by her mother, Sarah Gray, in the woods near their house. Gray is not the only child to vanish, in the last six weeks four--”

Dean grabs the food from the countertop, holding a gutted fish by the tail and a headless chicken by the feet.

Sam looks up from fiddling with the radio. “Going to feed the angel?”

“Yep.”

“I don’t think you should be alone with it. You don’t want to break your other arm.”

“I’ll keep my distance.” He’s learned his lesson. Keep the angel at an arm's length of his arm's length. “We still got a box of nightcrawlers around?”

“You’re going to feed it worms?”

“If it won’t take the chicken or the fish.”

Sam rolls his eyes. “Alright. Whatever keeps it from trying to eat our customers.”

Dean goes outside with his armful of food and doesn’t miss the way the angel’s head jerks up out of its wing. The wounds on the angel’s chest have grown over to pink skin, both its wings move easily and Dean knows the thing is fast. He tosses in a worm first, just because, and is surprised when the angel’s hand darts forward and seizes the little wriggling thing. Sharp teeth flash in the moonlight and the worm disappears into its mouth. Dean gives a low whistle and tosses in a chicken leg next. That, too, is promptly devoured. The angel even sucks the flesh out from under the scaly skin on its foot. This time Dean laughs aloud. “You’ll eat just about anything, won’t you?”

The angel looks up and Dean is taken aback; he swears the expression on its face is anger, as though it has pride that's been insulted. Dean steps slowly closer to the bars.

“You’d kill me if you could, wouldn’t you?” he asks softly. He takes another step forward.

The angel’s clawed hand swipes out between the bars and Dean leaps back. It barely misses catching his shirt in its claws. Angry now, Dean throws the rest of the chicken into the cage. But, as if its pride is now overruling its hunger, the angel doesn’t even glance down at the chicken lying in a pale lump on the floor of the cage. It sinks back into the shadows and folds its wings around its body.

Still, when Dean comes out later to gather firewood, he sees that all that’s left of the chicken is its bones and some gristle. The angel is curled up at the back of the cage, asleep and barely visible under its wings.

*

News about the angel spreads. The lines begin to stretch down the street, and then to the wharf, and then people start coming in ferryloads from the mainland just to hand over their quarter and get a glimpse of the angel in its cage. Their little town, which had been a quiet fishing village until that point, is suddenly full of life. It’s overflowing. What few boarding houses they have are booked weeks in advance and local residents have started offering rooms at a minimum of five dollars a night. The town swells and grows. Tourism is great for the economy.

Dean doesn’t take to the endless parade of onlookers trotting in and out of his property. He insists on locking the gates before it’s dark; they hardly ever need to take _The Impala_ out anymore, but he doesn’t feel right if he doesn’t get down to the water to make sure she’s still in top condition.

“Wait!” one tourist in a fancy overcoat and fedora cries when Dean shuts the gate against the swelling tide of people outside. “I’ll pay two quarters!”

“No.” Dean turns the key in the lock.

“Please!”

“Go away.”

He doesn’t take the hint. Not even after Dean’s drenched him with a bucket of rainwater. He just stands there, water trickling down from the brim of his hat, coins held in his outstretched hand.

Sam spends his evenings counting money and fiddling with the radio. Dean props his feet up on the table with a tumbler of scotch in his hand and revels in the hours of peace, trying to tune out the news about Jane Kingsley, age eight, disappeared two weeks ago, and of Brian Summers, age five, disappeared Monday. He can't afford to care; he tells himself someone better will work that job.

For its part, the angel sits in its cage with its wings wrapped around itself, looking for all the world like a giant dead crow. It only comes alive at night, when it sings.

*

A month or so after the angel fell into their yard, Sam brings his ledger to the table and makes Dean look at it.

“Why me, Sam?” Dean complains, the book open but sad and ignored before him. “I don’t care about numbers.”

“You should take a look at this,” Sam says, and leans across the table to flip through the pages. “We charge less than a dollar to take a look at the angel but look at how much we’re making. I mean, we’re not wealthy but we have enough to, to--” He flounders around for, Dean thinks, something they’d actually want to spend money on. “Repaint _The Impala_!”

“She’s got a good paint job,” Dean says defensively.

“Fine, then, we can buy new sails if we ever need to, or, I don’t know, take a vacation and visit Bobby. Or get new shoes.”

“Or buy enough food to get happy and fat, Sam, I get it.”

“The point is that we’re actually making money now. Dean,” Sam says urgently, his finger jabbing at a large number in the ledger, “this is _much_ more lucrative than fishing.”

“What are you suggesting?” Dean asks, though he thinks he knows. He leans back in his chair and sighs, runs his hands down his face. “It’s not exactly my fondest wish to go into showbusiness.”

“Yeah, me neither, but--” Sam hesitates.

“It’s an angel.” Then Dean emphasizes, “It’s a monster. We used to kill monsters, not take them on the road for people to ooh and ahh at.”

“Dean, not all monsters--” Sam stops. He tries again. “Ever since Dabir, you’ve--”

“I don’t want to talk about Dabir!” Dean shouts, and to his surprise, he’s on his feet and the ledger has crashed to the kitchen floor. Sam stares up at him, startled. Trying for a calmer voice and failing, Dean snarls, “It killed a kid, Sam. I’m not going to put it on show for people to gawk at!”

Then, fully aware that that’s exactly what they’re doing and furious about it, Dean stomps out of the kitchen and into his room.

That night, Dean lies under his covers in the dark and can’t sleep. Outside, the angel makes plaintive cries, like the call of a gull, singing its sadness into the night. It doesn’t sound too much like any monster Dean has ever met. He folds his pillow over his ears but the angel’s cries keep on till morning.

*

It's a year after Dean and John split up that Bobby's telegram catches up to him. It's a very short message, and as soon as Dean has read it he goes into their bedroom and packs a suitcase with shaking hands and tells Cassie how to reach him. He says he might be gone a while. He kisses her. He leaves _The Impala_.

The message was simple: John Winchester is dead.

He's expecting to find his father's body when he gets to Bobby's place out in the middle of nowhere. What he didn't expect was Sam.

“It’s good to see you, Dean,” Sam says and Dean doesn’t get a chance to answer, crushed in his little brother’s hug.

Just like that, the year Sam spent away at school disappears. They stay up half the night talking about what each of them has been doing (although Dean, too terrified of its longevity and intensity, neglects to mention his relationship with Cassie), and some of the vast lostness he's been feeling since his father died fades away. Later, they [burn John Winchester under an open sky](http://pics.livejournal.com/whisperelmwood/pic/0002a0sa), and the smoke trails away into the stars.

The next morning, as they crunch bacon at Bobby's table, Dean asks, “What time does the train leave from the station? I’ll ride out there with you, see you off.”

Sam puts his cup down on the table, slides his open palms over his pants.

“I’m not going.”

Dean pauses, piece of bacon dangling from his mouth, and listens, scans Sam’s face.

"It's dangerous to go it alone," Sam says. "I don't want my next trip to Bobby's to be to bury _you_. We can... we can do it together again." He stares down into his coffee, and Dean has never seen anyone so big look so shy.

"Yeah," Dean says, and his voice has gone hoarse without his permission. "Yeah, of course."

Without _The Impala_ , they get by on improvised travel. They catch rides in the cars of strangers. They rent the occasional horse. They use up favors from every contact Bobby can give them. Sam even manages to make Dean take the train after he’s gotten a fifth of whiskey into him. They see America like they never did. They’re around people rather than the endless stretch of sea. Hunting isn’t so isolated when they move around this way. If _The Impala_ wasn’t his best girl, Dean would consider storing up enough money to buy a car. And they're hunting a lot; Dean sends Cassie letters from everywhere, but they keep getting sidetracked by hunt after urgent hunt, it's a full year before they finally make their way back to the East Coast.

They’re just outside of Boston, hacking their way through a vampire nest, heads rolling around their feet on the floor, when he decides it’s time to go back to both his girls. Sam’s stuck by him a year now. He can trust him not to leave.

Cassie opens the door to her apartment and Dean is acutely aware of just how things have changed. A year is a long time. Long enough for anything to happen.

Cassie kisses his cheek. She greets Sam with a polite hello. Then she thrusts forward the infant she’s carrying.

“This is Dabir.”

He looks at the baby in Cassie’s arms, the green eyes, the dark hair, the small hands and feet, and falls in love with his son.

Sam sucks in a breath, curls both his hands into Dean’s sleeve. This is Dean’s family. This is Sam’s family. They’re not going to be alone in the world ever again.

He takes Dabir into his arms, cradles his head, holds him steady. The baby wriggles in his shawl but doesn’t cry. He’s quiet, soft, sleepy, and Dean can’t believe that someone he just met could make him so happy, make him feel so complete. An illegitimate child, born to a woman no state will ever let him legally marry. His father’s salted, scorched ashes would roll over in their grave.

“Why didn’t you tell me? You knew how to reach me.” Three months. He’s had a son three months and didn’t know. Cassie’s had to live the life of an unmarried mother with a mixed child, and live it alone. Dean feels a fierce burst of pride in mother and child: his family.

He loves her, more than he ever thought was possible. It's how he thinks his father felt for his mother while he was alive.

“I knew you’d see him for yourself when you came back.”

*

It is a quiet dead night, blanketed in mist, and Dean has been sitting at the kitchen table as if in a trance, a book open before him and his broken arm comfortable in its sling against his side, his candle guttering low. He’s watching the tendrils of mist twine gently around the bars of the angel’s cage. Then, in the bleary light of the pale fog-obscured moon, a shadow circles in the yard. A shadow with enormous wings. Dean knows what it is before it actually lands. Another angel come to see a fallen friend.

The angel is a woman, this time, beautiful, with long red hair. Even in the darkness, Dean can make out her dark, solemn eyes in her pale face as she touches down in their backyard. She sprints through the mud to get to the angel’s cage. The sound that erupts from her throat is relieved, elated. She rattles the lock on the cage door, and though he's been watching entranced up until now, Dean jerks in his chair. But the lock holds fast, and the angel's cry is transformed by grief as she tilts her head towards the moon and wails like she’s found him dead. Her companion -- or brother? Or lover? -- is alive, in good condition, and maybe, to her, Dean thinks, that is a fate worse than death. He’s healthy, whole, and unable to be with her. Dean tries to imagine himself in this position, seeing Sam locked away, so close but out of reach.

Their angel, and that’s what he is at this point, theirs, a piece of property to own, a meal ticket, their hopes and dreams, presses himself up against his bars and strains to grasp at her. In one leap, her body is against the metal, her forehead touching his forehead through the gap between the bars. Their hands curl together, fingers entwined in such a way that their claws vanish, so that it could be two human hands clasped desperately through the bars, and with their wings hidden in the blackness of the night, the two simply look like people. Like two lovers from a tragedy, torn apart and reunited.

“Dean, why’re you awake?” Sam stumbles into the room in his overlong nightshirt, eyes half closed, wet hair plastered to his face. “Is your arm hurting? Do you want some whiskey?”

“There’s more of them.” A midnight drizzle has started. The angels in the courtyard are only warped figures through the moisture on the glass.

“Shit.” Sam grabs the shotgun from above the back door. He loads two shells into the barrel. “Wait here.”

Sam charges out, fires a warning shot up into the air.

The female angel startles and flaps her wings, rising like a panicked pigeon into the night. She doesn’t leave, however. She circles high above, crying out what sounds like, feels like, a goodbye, sharp with pain.

Their angel responds to her with a long, slow note of song, inconsolable and sad. He’s giving up. He’s telling her to go. Dean doesn’t need to understand angel-speak to know. He recognizes the tone, the flatness of defeat. He hears himself, in that instant, his own voice in that inhuman, angel sound, telling Sam to save himself, to let Dean drown, to get out.

She passes overhead once more. Against the whiteness of the full moon, her profile is dark, beautiful, dwarfed by the stunning outline of her wings.

“How do you think she knew he was here?” He has whiskey waiting for Sam on the table. His own glass already sits wet, empty, and he’s contemplating pouring himself another drink to help him sleep.

“She could probably hear him, smell him. Maybe she can even read.” Sam holds up a crumpled piece of paper soaked in water and crusted with mud. “I found this in the yard.”

It’s a flier advertising for their angel. It wasn’t made locally. The flier was printed somewhere on the mainland by someone with access to paper and ink and printing machines. Word about the angel is spreading. And it’s spreading fast.

*

The carriages roll up, wheels squelching and horses splashing through the puddles and mud. There are half a dozen of these carriages, each pitch black, identical save for the drivers, who are all a uniform shade of gray-white like the flat sky above, but with distinctly unique facial features. They look like they’ve seen Death or have come to know him personally.

“Who do you think they are?” Dean asks, unlacing his sopping boots where he sits with Sam the kitchen table and craning his neck to see through the rain-misted window. They haven’t had a dignitary or aristocrat come to see the angel yet. Their price is too cheap, their display too vulgar.

“I don’t know.” Sam stops counting yesterday’s intake, which he separates according to type of coin, notates in the ledger and stuffs into an old wooden chest that is growing heavier by the day. “They look rich, from the mainland maybe?”

“Maybe.” He shrugs and turns over his boots to empty them. A thin dribble of water rushes out of each shoe, but he still squelches with every step. “Everyone is dying to see the angel, soon they’ll start bringing their own boatloads over.” Out the back window, in his cage, the angel is nestled beneath his wings and water rolls off his feathers and puddles on the gray metal. He looks like a bird riding out a summer storm or a quail sheltering her brood.

“They might be local, I don’t know, this is strange.”

Strange doesn’t come close.

The line of carriages stops in front of their house. The horses pant, their black coats drenched from the rain and the thick morning mist. The fog is so heavy it feels like outside the sky is more water than air.

A man exits the lead carriage. He’s tall and thin and dressed in black. He looks like a mourner on his way to escort a body to its grave. There is a sharpness to his face, an unpleasant quality. Dean doesn’t like the way he smiles. The man’s eyes inexplicably remind him of blood and bone and cold, jagged shards of misery. A remnant of hunting life, perhaps, that has him looking for the worst in people.

The man goes around to the opposite side of the carriage and opens the door. A little girl steps out and into the soupy ground, soiling her white shoes with mud. She’s dressed like a princess, adorned perfectly in pink, her blonde hair tied in neat ribbons, and her dress cuts off just above the dimples in her knees. She’s precious; so sweet-looking it hurts. He doesn’t trust her, not for a second. She slides her hand into the man’s and he opens a black umbrella to cover them both from the curtain of drizzling rain. She has something clutched in her free hand, something small and metal and square.

They don’t knock at the side gate, but cross to the next street that runs parallel to the front of the house. Dean watches them disappear out of the window, leaving a line of lifeless black carriages in the rain. A moment later, there is a sharp rapping on the front door.

Dean exchanges a glance with Sam, and they both rise up out of their chairs and move through the hallway to the front door. The girl in pink and the man in black stand hand-in-hand on their stoop, dry and calm beneath their umbrella.

“Hi,” the girl says; beaming. She’s darling, really, with her round face and too big front teeth. “I’m Lilith and I want to see your angel.”

“Hello, Lilith, I’m Sam and this is my brother Dean.” Sam holds out his hand but Lilith moves forward and hugs him instead, wraps her small arms around one of Sam’s legs, never letting go of whatever she’s holding. It looks like some kind of cage. Sam’s eyebrows have shot to his hairline by the time she releases him.

“Hi Dean!” She hugs him this time, arms like a vice around his thighs, and Dean has to raise his broken arm to keep the top of her head from colliding with the sling. “This is Listi. He takes care of me.”

“Alastair,” the man corrects, nodding. He locks eyes with Dean and doesn’t blink for over a minute. Alastair is sizing him up, taking him in. His eyes gleam with a cold, calculating interest that makes Dean’s stomach roll once, hot and uncomfortable.

“You big silly.” Lilith gives Alastair a small push. “Your name is Listi now. I decided.”

Alastair doesn’t answer, but he gives Lilith an affectionate pat on the head.

“That’s okay.” Lilith grabs his hand again and swings her arm. “Let’s go see the angel.”

“This way.” Dean leads them around the side of the house and towards the back.

The angel is grooming his wings. He uses his claws to pick out bits of dust and other debris, then he uses the undersides of his fingers to smooth the feathers over. While they watch, he begins his stretching routine: opening one wing to the joint can only think of as the elbow, then collapsing that and unfolding the rest. The cage is too small for him to stretch even one wing to its fullest.

Sam politely says, “There’s a fee, of course.”

“Give Sam the money, Listi.” Lilith lets go of Alastair’s hand and moves towards the angel, little iron cage in her hand held close to her heart.

“Not too close,” Dean says out of habit, but the arm he’s half-extended to pull her back by the shoulder hesitates in the air, and he draws it back.

Alastair gives a handful of coins to Dean. They’re heavy, made from silver, and he’s only seen coins like them a few times in his life, when he and Sam were hunting near the Mexican border.

“Pesos?” Sam says, peering at the pile of coins in Dean’s palm. Dean mouths _How much is this?_ at him, but Sam shrugs and makes a face. Dean stuffs the money into his pocket, wondering how much more than thirty-five cents Alastair gave him.

“We’re from down south,” Alastair says and moves away. Even with the umbrella, his suit is soaked through and clings to him. He’s thin with a promise of muscle. He stands dutifully at Lilith’s heels and doesn’t look at the angel once.

Dean feels eyes on his shoulder blades and shudders. There’s something _off_ about these people. Why is a grown man taking orders from a child? A shiver of unease forms ice in his bones.

“This is why we didn’t settle in a city,” he whispers to Sam. “They're strange.” Lilith doesn’t act like the other children who have come to see their angel. The kids from around the village play and laugh, make loud noises of wonder and babble at the angel through the bars. They take delight in seeing the creature. Lilith’s blue eyes glint with cold appreciation. Alastair stands behind her, but he never shows any interest in the angel they traveled thousands of miles to see. Dean doesn’t have to look to know that Alastair is staring at him.

“I think ‘Listi’ likes you,” Sam sniggers, wet hair plastered to his forehead, creating a damp brown fringe over his eyes.

“Shut up,” he says, transfixed by the sight of half a dozen spiders crawling over the toe of his boot. The spiders scurry through mud and grass and puddles in a single-file line. It’s unnatural, unsettling, to see them moving together that way, forty-eight legs acting as one. The line disappears into the waterlogged grass where they drown and die, carried away by the trickle of water rushing down the slanted ground towards the sea.

The angel growls in his cage and lashes out, talons extended towards Lilith’s soft, unprotected stomach. In its sling, Dean’s arm throbs at the memory of that hand snapping through bone and those claws ripping open muscle and tissue to let loose the intestines coiled beneath. Lilith doesn’t flinch or cry. Most children, when confronted by that kind of violence, that uncontrollable ferocity, have the sense to back away.

“I like him,” Lilith says, looking at no one in particular. “Listi.”

Alastair turns on his heel and walks briskly around the house towards the carriages. He returns with a metal chest, about a cubic foot in size, and presents it to Dean. Inside there are eight silver rectangular bars, stacked neatly onto and beside each other, just enough of them to fill the chest. Dean bets the only things he’s ever owned that are this much pure silver are the bullets and knives he and Sam and Dad had to make from scratch.

“We’re here to purchase your angel,” Alastair says.

“I want him to be my new pet,” Lilith tells Dean, reaching for his good hand. “I have lots of pets already, but none like him.”

That’s when he sees it. [The thing dangling from Lilith’s fingers](http://pics.livejournal.com/whisperelmwood/pic/0002dbpa), in a lavish, carefully constructed cage, is a giant, hairy spider with two dozen eyes and only six legs. He’s willing to bet all the money in the chest that the legs didn’t come off by accident.

“Your offer is generous.” Sam steps up, steps in, chest out, body language defensive. He wonders when his little brother started standing up for him rather than the other way around. “But our angel’s worth more than that.”

Alastair swings his arm in the direction of the carriages. “You haven’t seen the other chests.”

Twenty, there are twenty chests inside the carriages, each of them filled with thirty pounds of silver and an occasional bar of gold. There are more metal cages, too, hanging from hooks lining the walls, and the interior of each cage is swaddled in white webbing. The spiders are all missing at least one leg, sometimes two, or even six, or eyes, and some cages are bare and empty. Dean thinks he can hear the scratching of the spiders’ remaining legs as they rub together. Rain trickles, cold, down from his hair and under his collar. It’s unsettling: to be doing business with people that in another year his gut would have warned him to hunt.

Sam silently calculates the sum. Dean doesn’t need to do the math to know the figure is staggering. More than they could ever make letting people come to see the angel a quarter apiece. This is enough to build a second house like theirs in the yard, this could buy them better, something with stone walls and marble corridors, a place without the ghost of their mother. There would still be enough left over afterwards to ensure they’d never need to fish to support themselves again. They could learn what real leisure was.

“I don’t want to sell him,” he says, pulls Sam aside to the fence. There’s water in his brother’s ear, droplets clinging to Sam’s skin like a group of mussels.

“The money.” Sam’s practical, smart, focused. “You know we need this. We could keep the angel for a hundred years and we’d never make half this much.”

“I don’t want it.”

He can’t forget the look on the angels’ faces as they stood with their hands clasped together through the iron bars of the cage. There was love there, so much devotion. A spark of _family_ in their touch. He’s drawn to it, towards the memories of what he used to have. He separated them, but he can’t sell the angel to a girl who has six carriages full of spiders missing legs.

“This is a onetime offer.” Alastair straightens his spine, shuts the chest in his hands. “We won’t be back.”

Sam leans in to Dean’s ear and whispers, “Don’t throw away our future.” _Don’t ask me to throw mine away again_ Dean knows he means and he’s never been more sorry.

The cold blue of Alastair’s eyes, the darkest parts of the sea frozen into ice. The sunshine and butter yellow of Lilith’s hair, the cheerful, rosy color in her cheeks. For all his feral strength, they’d tear the angel apart in seconds.

“No,” Dean says.

He faces Lilith and Alastair, framed against one of their black carriage in the misting rain. He tells himself he’d pawn the angel off onto anyone else in a heartbeat. Just not them.

“You squandered a wonderful opportunity,” Alastair sighs. He reaches out for Lilith’s hand.

Lilith’s eyes are wide and full of tears.

“I hate you.” She sounds calm, collected, like a stalking cat, a whisper of paws in the grass. “You’re gonna be sorry you were mean to me. I hope you die and worms eat your brains.”

“You’re precious,” Dean says to her, watching, relief a freed kite inside his chest, drifting up and towards the sky. “Have a nice trip.”

They watch the carriages roll away from the relative warmth inside their kitchen, horses with their heads turned to the side, away from the water and wind. There’s a flicker of light behind the thin curtains and Dean can imagine a kerosene lantern hanging from the roof, swinging as the carriage jolts, Lilith with her hands and arms covered with her pet spiders. The angel, too, has his head cocked like he’s listening to the danger clatter away, and in his relief, Dean splashes out into the yard again and tosses him an extra leg of chicken.

*

Elizabeth Lupon clutches the silver lighter her older sister left behind as she crouches on the stoop of the house, huddling away from the rain. The skies overhead are stuffed with fat-bellied clouds that spit rain into the gloomy gray world underneath. The budding trees and squat houses stand wet and dark against the clouds, and underneath them hurries a line of people with their coats up around their necks. Even in this weather, people are going to see the angel. Elizabeth came out to sell the lighter to one of them, with the idea that a tourist wouldn’t know that the name _Winchester_ carved into the lighter must refer to the _only_ Winchesters in town, or that they might think it was a good souvenir of their visit to the angel, and therefore she stands a chance of not being apprehended as a thief. Still, she stays huddled in the sheltered lee of the stoop, arms around her knees.

The door behind her bursts open and Elizabeth sees a sturdy black boot under a skirt aiming a kick at her. “Get!” shrieks a woman’s voice. “Urchin!”

Before the blow can land, Elizabeth goes flying out into the rain and through the puddles shimmering in the muddy street. She splashes her way into the crowd. Raindrops plaster her bedraggled bangs to her forehead and slide down the back of her neck. She scrubs her wet hair out of her eyes and, in that small moment of blindness, collides into something large and scratchy.

Elizabeth looks far, far up into the annoyed black eyes of a brown-skinned man wearing a damp wool coat. Her first instinct is to bolt, but then her gaze falls to the girl at the man’s side, a little younger than Elizabeth, one hand in the hands of each of her parents, looking at Elizabeth with a shy smile. Elizabeth thinks of her own siblings at home, and the thought grounds her.

“Hi!” she chirps, the way she’s heard Darlene do it. “Here to see the angel?”

“Yes,” the little girl whispers.

If Darlene hadn't disappeared she would probably have had some sort of pitch for this, but Elizabeth’s nerve fails her again and all she can do is hold out the lighter and squeak “Souvenir!”

Luckily, the girl’s mother smiles with real warmth. “It’s very nice,” she says. “I lost my old one on the way over here. How much?”

Somehow, Elizabeth manages to mumble out the price and pass the lighter to the woman before she snatches the money in her outstretched hand and dashes through the streets back home, heart jumping with success. Back with the family going to see the angel, the lighter disappears into the handbag of Margarita Gutierrez.

*

Dean finds that some habits are hard to break. He still gets the urge to take _The Impala_ out and stand on deck, fishing rod in hand, and reel in whatever he can manage to catch. Ironically, it’s now that their livelihood no longer depends on fishing that he starts to get good at it. He catches more for leisure than he ever did when he was catching for the dinner table. And with all the food they can afford now, freshly butchered meat and expensive cheese, the fish sits in the ice box for days at a time before they finally get around to cooking it.

One warm late spring night, the day after he had finally and with exuberant glee been able to take the sling off his arm, Dean carries his basket of fresh-caught fish over to the angel’s cage. He’s in a generous mood and more than once he’s spotted the angel prodding his chicken dinner boredly around the mud on the floor of the cage. So Dean brings out a blanket and settles it on the dewy grass outside the cage. All that can be seen of the angel inside is the moonlight gleaming on his glossy wings; the light shifts as the angel moves.

"Nice night, isn't it?" he says. He's taken up the habit, in recent weeks, of coming outside and chatting to the angel for a while. If questioned he wouldn't be able to explain exactly why he does it; but he likes being able to just talk, and though he knows the angel is dangerous and inhuman, after the female angel visited, Dean can't shake the feeling that he could use some company.

Dean picks up a fat fish from the basket and tosses it between the bars. One hand darts into the shaft of moonlight falling inside the cage, intercepts the fish’s silver arc, and snatches it back into shadow. There come wet tearing sounds.

After a few minutes, a bloody fish skeleton comes sailing out of the shadows and lands in the dark tufts of grass. The angel edges out after it, eyeing Dean’s basket avidly.

Grinning, Dean throws in another. The angel sets in with the same voraciousness.

“I caught them myself,” he tells the angel proudly. They’re good sized fish, just starting to put on fat now that it’s nearly summer. They’re going to start getting huge in a few weeks.

The angel tears the head off one of the fish.

“Careful,” he says, like he’s talking to a child. “Don’t eat the little bones. You could choke.”

As if to prove a point, the angel damn near swallows the rest of the fish whole.

“Glad to see my hard work is appreciated.” He tosses in another, listening with a smile to the sound of content grunts and noisy chewing. “I think Sam and me are pretty tired of fish at this point, we used to eat it almost everyday. Man.” He laughs to himself. “Kind of reminds me of when we were kids. Dad would feed us so much beans. Now neither of us can touch the stuff. Not that beans ever agreed much with Sam, lemme tell you. I would make him sleep on deck.”

The angel whistles impatiently, and Dean notices that he has stripped the good meat off the fish -- but is apparently no longer hungry enough to have swallowed the guts. He flings the remains away from the cage and holds his hand out for another. Dean shakes his head and reaches into the basket for the lone fish at the bottom, a nice salmon. He holds it up by the tail. “Last one!”

He throws it into the cage, but his aim goes askew and the salmon glides through two sets of bars and lands with a sad splat in the mud outside. The angel frowns unhappily and casts Dean a look that clearly says _You are an idiot_. Dean gets to his feet and squishes through the grass to where the fish lies in a pool of muddy water. He wipes the mud off on the knees of his trousers. The angel watches him with his wings hanging loose along his sides. Without thinking about it, Dean puts his arm through the bars and holds the fish out to the angel.

For a single wild moment, his head spins with the craziness of what he’s just done, and he’s overwhelmed with the instinct to yank his arm out, back to safety. And yet some deeper instinct prevails, and his hand remains steady.

Without the slightest violence, the angel hooks the fish from Dean with his clawed fingers and withdraws to the other side of the cage. For a brief moment, Dean’s eyes are caught in an intense, blue, alien gaze. Then the angel sinks back into darkness. His wings come up around him, spangled in the blackness with the reflections of stars.

Dean walks out of the yard unable to remember the precise moment he started breathing again, his empty basket dangling from his fingertips.

*

On a wet Saturday morning, a crowd of children, free of the obligations of church and school, run into their yard. They pile their handful of dimes into Sam’s hands. Today, the windblown yard is host to only a few visitors, who are all standing around the cage with attitudes of grim determination, clutching their sodden coats around themselves. The kids immerse themselves among them -- so very close to the cage.

Dean resists the urge to put himself between them and the cage, a barrier, and lets them creep in steadily closer. They’re timid at first; his daily warnings have appeared to have gotten through, but even fear is not strong enough to suppress curiosity and awe. Whispering among themselves, the kids move in until they’re a few inches from the thick metal bars, well within arm’s reach. Dean's body thrums with tension: if the angel lunges, he's not sure he can save them --

The angel, perhaps startled by their proximity, doesn’t immediately launch himself at the bars. He sits with his wings wrapped protectively around his body, feathers standing up straight.

“Wow,” the smallest girl says, reaching out a finger, as though she wants to stroke the scaled skin on his feet. Dean’s there, though, wrapping his palm around her wrist, holding her back. Raindrops dot the back of his exposed hand.

“Don’t touch him,” he tells her. Her eyes are big as quarters.

The angel pokes his head out over the tops of his wings. His gaze holds no malice, only an intent, intelligent curiosity. The kids goggle at him. He watches them back, and gradually, his feathers deflate.

Cautiously, Dean lets go of his hold on the girl’s wrist. Her little fingers reach out and touch the bars.

The angel gazes at her for a few moments. Dean’s whole body is one tight coil of wire. His hands are ready to snatch her away. Then the angel recrosses his arms over his knees and his head drops back down below his wings.

Dean relaxes away from the bars. He lets them play around the cage, and when Sam calls him from inside, he walks slowly backwards toward the house and then lets them disappear from his line of sight.

When he comes back outside, they’re still fine, and the angel is still dozing under his wings.

*

On a rare sunny day, with a warm breeze ruffling the treetops and the feathers on the angel’s wings, a group of children from nearby houses comes to listen to one of Dean’s stories. He sits them down on the grass outside the angel’s cage and goes inside to get an item he knows they’ll love. He comes back outside with a sword in his hand and a chorus of _oooh_ s immediately rises from the kids gathered in the yard. Sunlight glitters golden on the blade, and the angel’s head also snaps up, attention caught.

The angel’s eyes track the sword as Dean settles on the ground with the children. He balances it carefully on his palms; he still keeps it sharp.

“Don’t tell Mayor Kubrick,” he warns, as he does before many of his stories, and several of the children giggle, “but I got this from a goddess.”

Kubrick insists that the deities of other religions are little more than spirits or demons tricking wayward folk into hell. Dean, though, knows what he knows, and he knows how to fight spirits and demons, and this was a _goddess_. The children look enraptured, and several of the little ones scoot closer.

“This happened years ago,” Dean begins, “and Sam and I were investigating disappearances a long, long way from here and we thought it might be a vengeful ghost or a demon.” The children, whose houses were all built with salt under the windowsills and doorways, shiver in delight. “All the victims were women, sometimes also their children, and they just vanished--” he clicks his fingers “--right into thin air. Everyone who disappeared was from the same neighborhood, a Nigerian immigrant community. So the police weren’t doing too much. Except when we finally found out who was doing it...” He pauses for effect. “It was a _human_.”

There are noises of surprise and horror from all around the circle.

“We found this fellow in this nice house outside the city, and it was filled with ants. A carpet of ants all through the house, crawling everywhere, over everything,” and Dean makes a creepy insectile motion with his fingers. “The bugs had sent this guy completely ‘round the bend. He was having nightmares of huge ants eating him alive. But you know, Sam and me, we were just hunters. It wasn’t our job to hurt people, even when they were bad.”

A little girl with her hands over her mouth lowers them long enough to say, “What did you _do?_ ”

“This part is pretty bad,” Dean cautions. “Are you sure you wanna hear it?”

The children nod vigorously.

“Really?” Dean teases. “You _sure?_ ”

“Yes!” the little girl squeaks through her fingers.

“Okay, since you’re sure you can handle it,” Dean says. He doesn’t mention that the murderer had been wealthy and white, and all the victims were poor black immigrants; there were no bodies; they hadn’t gone to the police. “Sam noticed that he had a sigil for protection tattooed on his hand. Figured the ants might mean something. We cut a line through the sigil, just a small, shallow cut, and BAM!” he shouts, and the children jump. Several of the people filing through the gate to take their few minutes goggling at the angel swivel their heads to stare at him. “The ants ate him.”

“They did not,” says a boy, eyes round with horror.

“They did. Right there in his own house.” Dean doesn’t elaborate on the gruesome details, but it had been mildly traumatizing to watch. “That’s when the goddess came down.”

A profound hush falls over the children. Birdsong and footsteps crunching in the grass filter down with the sunshine.

“She was beautiful,” Dean says honestly, “and also really scary. She’d been trying to protect those people, but the sigil was keeping her away. Her name was Ala. She said thank you, and she gave me this.”

He hefts the sword so the children can see, and every pair of eyes follows it, including the angel’s. They all peer at the strange lettering on the blade. It’s in no language Dean knows, and impressively, no language Bobby knows either.

“What does it do?” asks another boy.

Dean shrugs. “It’s a sword,” he says. “It kills things pretty good.”

Someone breaks away from the crowd milling in front of the gate, and with a small tingle of alarm, Dean sees that Mayor Kubrick is cutting across the yard toward them with a suspicious frown on his face. “And that, kids,” Dean finishes hastily, “is why you don’t leave the sugar bowl out. Because ants will get in. Heya, Mayor!”

He springs to his feet and, with a swell of disappointed grumbling, the group of children dissipates. Several of them wave to the angel, and a few of the people grouped around the cage shriek in surprise as the angel, looking as though he’s trying to understand what the point of the gesture is, waves back.

*

Dabir laughs, bell-bright and happy, as Sam chases him through the garden, scoops him up and spins him around.

Dabir sleeps on his chest, their hearts pressed together, lulled by the steady sync of beats. Their breathing in tandem. Dabir’s head tucked against his chin.

Sam reads his favorite passages from the Bible. Stories of Samson, Moses, Noah, while Cassie rocks Dabir to sleep and Dean sharpens their knives in the corner, surrounded, warmed, by the pulse and hum of a family.

*

Now that Dean has stopped corralling any kids who tromp into the yard into a tight-knit, frightened bundle kept at a safe distance, more and more children come to stare at the angel. He seems to have grown accustomed to the excited shrieks of wonder and laughter that erupt daily, and watches the children tumble and play on the grass with as much interest as they watch him.

Reveling in the warmth, Dean has plunked himself down in the lush grass in the backyard, back against the side of the house and legs sprawled every which way. He has a hunk of wood in one hand, which he is attempting to hack into a recognizable shape with the knife held in the other. The sunlight warms the top of his head and his shoulders. The good weather called many people away to sea, and the yard is practically empty today. He puts down the knife when he sees a little girl toddling up to the angel, something square and brown in her hand. Dean is still inherently wary and cautious, but he laughs to himself when he sees that what the girl is holding is a melty square of chocolate.

He can tell the girl is about to thrust her arm through the bars, and Dean gets to his feet, calling out “Hey!”

The girl looks up at him and holds out the chocolate. “I bought him a present!”

“Well, I think I’d better be the one to give it to him,” Dean says. “Is that okay?”

“Okay,” the girl says, and passes Dean the candy, “but tell him it’s from Bethany.”

Smiling, Dean turns to the cage. “Angel,” he says, “this is from Bethany.” He eases his hand through the bars. The angel sniffs hesitantly at the offering. The tip of a pink tongue emerges from between his lips and touches to the chocolate.

“Eat it,” the girl says to him excitedly. “It’s yummy!”

The angel pinches the square of chocolate in the claws on his forefinger and thumb and sniffs at it for a moment before dropping it into his mouth. Then he actually chirps in pleasure, and as Dean laughs again, holds his hand out for more.

“Look, he likes it!” Bethany shrieks, and passes Dean another piece. This one bigger, and while the angel eats she sneaks her small hand into the confines of his cage to pet the feathers on his wing.

*

Dean and Sam get new neighbors, and they start coming by to see the angel. First they stop by once a week, then twice, until finally they are in the courtyard every day for hours at a time, and Dean stops bothering to charge them. Lisa Braeden, new to the island, a widow, usually lounges against the back of the house with Dean, sipping coffee from two of the three mugs Dean and Sam own, and together they watch her son toddle among the crowd gathered around the angel.

“Bird, bird!” Lisa’s son, Ben, two years old and tiny, chirps, pointing a chubby finger at the angel’s black wings. Ben doesn’t understand the reality of angels yet, and Lisa has informed Dean that he fancies this angel to be an impressive, exotic bird.

“Not exactly, buddy.” Dean bends down so that he is eye level with Ben. “He’s an angel, technically. At least, we think he is. We’ll never really know for sure.”

Ben blinks, as if to absorb all Dean has said to him, and then continues babbling “Bird!”

Dean laughs and ruffles Ben’s hair. “If you want him to be a bird, then he can be a bird.”

Ben looks at the angel with his thumb in his mouth, and makes soft, cheeping noises. To everyone’s surprise, the angel whistles back. Several people in the crowd, who visit regularly but have never heard the angel make so much as a peep before, yell and leap backwards, and an excited clamor breaks out among the onlookers. Ben claps his hands, thrilled, and makes the cheeping noise again, to which the angel responds with another whistle. His mother turns to Dean, eyes shining.

“That is so cute. Look at them, they’re talking.”

They make noises back and forth for a while, until Ben makes to stick his whole arm through the bars. Both Lisa and Dean shout, “Ben, no!” and he quails back, looking momentarily scared by their reactions.

And then the angel slides his own clawed hand out between the bars. The crowd gasps as one, but no one moves to interrupt as Ben’s chubby little hand curls around the angel’s index finger.

The angel’s head tilts to the side as he stares down at the child hanging off his hand. Ben holds on for a few seconds, until he loses interest, and goes off to make hand prints in the mud. But Dean stays there and watches and watches the angel, and he no longer looks like a monster at all.

*

Dean is looking forward to rest and warmth when he and Sam return from their hunt to their rented room, but he’s met at the door not with a kiss or Dabir’s arms around his leg, but with Cassie’s mournful screams. He’s never heard anything like the sounds Cassie is making. It chills him to the bone, stops his heart. His stomach bottoms out. Inside he feels nauseous and liquid, the tight, uncomfortable sensation of dread.

Cassie is sitting in Dabir’s bedroom, in the rocker Sam carved for her, clutching a bloodied bundle to her chest. There are tears on her face, on her clothes, and Dean can’t make his feet connect with his brain. There is a horror in her expression that his mind refuses to understand. He’d give anything to be dead, right then. Anything so as not to have to deal with this, what he knows will break his heart.

“Dabir,” Cassie chokes, on her own saliva and tears, and her words are hoarse from all her screaming. “Dabir.”

Sam’s the one brave enough to do it. Sam pulls the blanket away, careful not to touch Cassie, and immediately breaks down, leans over and throws up all over himself and the floor. Sam sinks to his knees and tries (and fails) to hold back bile with his hand. It drips out yellow between his fingers and the noises Sam makes are wet, choking, a dry heave that becomes a sob.

There’s barely any of Dabir left. His son is empty, missing everything important, his organs and blood and guts. Dabir’s a shell, a papier-mâché piñata, only a husk of skin filled with bones. Dabir’s body is covered in blood, so are the sheets on the bed and the front of Cassie’s nightgown.

“Sam,” Dean says numbly, moving his head as though in water to look at his brother. “We need to get him to the hospital.”

Sam shakes his head, and Dean repeats, louder now, “Come on! We have to get him to the hospital!”

“Dean, no,” Sam whispers, and the understanding hits Dean that it’s too late.

Dean moves until his back hits the wall, until he’s sitting, knees to his chest and face in his hands. He never knew he could cry like this, so hard it feels like everything inside him is going to come falling out, like his ribcage is splitting open. His son, his little boy, the best thing in his life, the person that kept everyone together, is dead.

Cassie covers Dabir back up, wraps the blanket tighter, and touches her lips to their son’s forehead. Her tears wash clean streaks on Dabir’s bloody skin, settle in his eyelashes like drops of dew, shimmering, catching every speck of light.

“How couldn’t I hear it?” Cassie asks, babbling, over and over. “He was sleeping right next to me in bed. How couldn’t I hear it?” In her arms, Dabir is beginning to smell.

“I’m so sorry,” Dean says without knowing that he’s speaking. He can barely breathe his chest is so heavy. His tongue is a thick dead thing in his mouth. “I should have been here. It’s my fault. It’s my fault. It’s my fault.”

*

“I had a son, you know,” Dean tells the angel in the blue predawn. He came out to get wood for the fire and he hasn’t. He doesn’t know why he’s doing this. “A family. I had another family before that, too.”

The angel rustles its wings, cocks its head. He’s never seen it so still, so peaceful.

“I left him alone. I wasn't there.” His throat tightens, spit turns burning hot. It hurts, letting out the things he never lets himself say, the stuff he let turn to bile that poisoned him, made his heart sick. “I left him alone and he died.”

There’s a certain irony, Dean thinks, in standing here spilling his heart about his dead kid to the creature who soaked the ground with Ronald Kopeki’s guts months ago. But he feels, in a muddled and confused and dark way, like he’s on the brink of something important, even if it’s also understated and small, like he’s been fumbling with wet tinder that’s about to finally catch fire. He's spent all this time being eaten alive with the knowledge that it was his fault Dabir died. He should have been there. He should have been -- And this angel killed a boy when Dean was standing only a few feet away and he could do nothing, yet he can no longer hate him. In the dark before the dawn, the angel in the cage and the man outside it, both separated from their families, both at fault for the death of a child, become one in Dean’s mind. And he can’t hate him.

"It was a mistake," Dean says. "It was a mistake." Something swells in his chest. He puts his hand on the bars. “You understand me, right?” he asks, though he’s known the answer for a while, and the angel makes a high noise, ruffles his wings. In the dying moonlight, the approaching sun, its feathers are dark as charcoal, shiny as polished flint. “Family? I know you’ve got one. A mom, a dad, maybe a wife, a kid of your own out there somewhere. A little brother who takes to the sky every morning, hoping you’ll come back. You have people you love.”

The angel _looks_ at him, wide eyes, and sings a single note. Dean thinks that’s all the answer he needs.

Dean goes inside the quiet house and fumbles through one of the kitchen drawers and goes back outside with the key. His feet squish in the wet grass. His fingers are as wrinkled as prunes. There’s moisture in the lock itself. Another few months in this weather, out in the elements, and the cage would have rusted permanently shut.

But it hasn't. The key turns. The angel glances from the Dean's face to his hands on the lock and back with something wild and uncontained in his expression.

“Go on,” Dean says and swings the door wide open. “Go home.”

The angel bursts out the door and rises, while the flutter of wings echoes through the courtyard, off the wooden walls of their house and towards the sea, and a part of Dean rises with him, also free.

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The pale dawn light tints the ocean a deep, impenetrable blue as Margarita and her family board the first ferry to the mainland.Even at that early hour the wharf throngs with the squawking cries of seagulls, the sound of boats creaking on the waves, and fishermen bustling about with boxes and ropes, barking out banter at one another. Masts jut in black silhouette against the rich blue sky like a copse of bobbing trees. Araceli has pressed herself half over the ferry's rail to watch the muffled morning clamor on the wharf, and Margarita keeps one hand curled into the crook of her daughter's elbow in case gravity and ill luck try to pull her to the dark waters below. Behind them, Esteban, collapsed onto a bench with their pile of suitcases, is nodding off onto his chest.

Work here was good for a while, and that angel was a sight to see, but now Esteban is bringing them to his cousin's farm up north, where, he says, the cows need to be milked twice a day and the fish run so thick in the water the seagulls stand upright on them. Esteban's cousin owns a boat of his own as well as a variety of livestock. It's work that will last for a long time.

Margarita links arms with her child, digs her cigarette case out of her handbag and cups her hand to form a protective lee from the chill dawn breeze around cigarette and lighter, the souvenir lighter with _Winchester_ carved into its gleaming metal body. Flames bite hungrily at the tip of her cigarette. As the ferry shudders into its first lethargic steps away from shore, Margarita kisses smoky breath into Araceli's hair. The inky water at their feet whips into white froth and the girl waves, waves at the receding town, Margarita's cigarette trailing thin wisps of smoke behind them, the silver lighter safe in her bag.

*

Castiel launches himself out the open door of his cage and bursts into the sky.

The cool morning air whips through his feathers as each powerful wingbeat lifts him higher and higher above the pinkening horizon. Below him wheel away the cottage, the gray wood smoke curling from its chimney, the squat shape of the cage, and the figure of a lone man, dwindling into a featureless black dot as Castiel pumps his way up, up into the air. He skims out above the sleeping houses clustered around the wharf, over the ships setting out like swarming ants into the sea, and banks in a long curve out over the ocean and back around to the island. Pine trees and craggy bluffs speed under him in a wild green blur. The forest ends in a frothy white line of waves crashing on the shore and Castiel shoots over the other side of the island and into the free sky above the sea.

After so long in cramped captivity, Castiel revels in flight. He spreads his wings to the fullest, so that the wind catches him and flings him aloft. Every muscle twinges and his outstretched pinions quiver. Cold wind streams over his skin. Above him the sky is a bowl of night-blue ink bleeding softer shades downward toward the horizon. Already the island is little more than a dark smudge on the ocean. It's nothing to compare to the wind in his feathers. Castiel angles himself northward, along the forested shore of the mainland, and sets his heart on home.

Before the sun is far risen, the fierce ache in Castiel's wings has him gliding quietly downward into a section of dense woods to rest awhile among the branches. He hasn't flown for months and the pain is incredible. He drapes his wings over either side of the branch he's perching on and, as he lets them hang there, pries the shaggy red bark off the trunk of the tree. He finds an assortment of beetles and ants, which he plucks off the tree and pops into his mouth. The first beams of pale sunlight begin to trickle, tinted green, through the branches, dappling Castiel's black feathers and naked skin with golden patches of light and warmth. Once the pain in his wings has mostly drained away, Castiel folds them behind himself, climbs up the tree out of the canopy and again plunges upward into the sky.

This time, he circles away from the mainland and strikes out above the endless sea. There are no landmarks above the water, but Castiel doesn't need help to find his way. No angel could lose its sense of the way home.

Castiel snags an updraft and settles in for a long and easy glide. With land far at his back and the sun tipping the vast plain of waves far below with sparkling gold, his thoughts turn back to his time in captivity. He recognizes that a change has taken place inside him. He's no longer quite the same Castiel who a storm flung into the unfriendly streets of a human village. And change doesn't come easily to angels. He is an old, old creature. He was there when the land rose from the depths of the water, and he had relished the chance to rest his wings.

Finally, as the sun creeps its way up the bright sky, the angels' island rolls over the horizon as little more than a distant, hazy shadow protruding from the water. Castiel fixes his gaze on it. Every cell in his body yearns to be there. His wings snap upward and press down, striving for height, until the thin air rasps in his lungs; then he tucks his wings back and drops into a shallow dive that sends him hurtling homeward.

The island looms over him, unchanged, looking like a square-topped mountain sprang from the ocean only to be sliced evenly in half. The sheer cliff rears thousands of feet straight up out of the thrashing sea, a wide jagged wall soaring up to impossible heights with its tip, a broad flat plateau, wreathed in clouds. Natural freshwater springs on the plateau spout waterfalls that dissipate into mist long before they hit the ocean below. The other side of the island tumbles down to sea level as a long slope cloaked in greenery and fir trees. And Castiel can see, as his flight brings him nearer, countless black wings flashing on rocky ledges on the cliff face, scattered between waterfalls and shrubbery clinging to the cliff at crazy angles. Angels in their nests. His family.

The island grows closer until the pine smell hits his nose and every needle on every tree is clear to him and then Castiel snaps out his wings and arcs around the edge of the cliff, so close his wingtips could almost brush stone. He sings a song of homecoming as he zips past blurred gray rock and streaks of black feathers where angels roost on the rocky outcroppings on the jagged cliff wall. Joyous calls of welcome erupt from hundreds of feet above and below him, rolling behind him like a wave as he wings along the cliff. The nest that he shares with Anna and Uriel is on a round little ledge about halfway up the occupied area of the cliff. He races onward, buoyed with excitement.

Anna sees him coming and leaps into the air to meet him halfway, screaming out an ecstatic gull-like cry. They clash in midair, interlocking hands and talons, spinning briefly as their wings work in confusion against each other. Anna drops back and dives past him, crashing on the ledge, as Castiel glides in for a somewhat more sedate landing. As soon as his claws click against stone Anna is back in his arms, pulling his head down to press his cheek against hers. Castiel's hands clutch at her back. Even Uriel flaps down from his regal perch in the tree clinging to the cliff above their nest and touches his forehead to Castiel's.

They hold each other close in silence for a while, their taloned feet fastened onto clawholds in the rock.

*

Castiel awakens unusually late in the morning to an empty nest. His wings have flopped on either side of him, stiff and aching, extended over the pad of woven leaves and moss that would normally serve as bedding for all three angels at once. Bare rock extends out past the bed for several feet before dropping precipitously into thin air. Castiel props himself up on his elbows and cranes his neck to look over his shoulder. The cliff towers behind him, bulging here and there with more nest ledges, speckled with stubborn and weatherbeaten greenery. Uriel is sitting on his haunches on the bowed trunk of his tree, gazing out to sea with his customary grumpiness. Angels flutter and crawl about the crags for a few hundred feet above their heads, and beyond them, for a long empty expanse of gray rock to the place where the cliff hits sky, the air is empty. No angel dares fly so high.

Castiel calls out a serene morning call to Uriel. Uriel shuffles his claws on the tree, rustles his wings, and casts a glare down at Castiel as if interrupted from stalking clever prey.

Castiel pulls himself to the edge of the nest and puts his head over into the open air. Below him, angels swoop to and fro among the waterfalls, cawing and singing at one another, all the way down to the sea, where they skim the surface hunting for fish. The height of the nest makes the waves into wrinkles and the angels indistinct, even for Castiel's keen eyesight, but he spots Anna among them by the bright blur of red hair above her flashing wings. She dips and circles above the water, swerving downward every so often to plunge her talons in. The sea breeze toys with Castiel's hair as he watches her. He stretches his wings out and flexes them gently, sore from shoulder to pinion but yearning to be down there fishing with Anna.

Anna strikes her claws into the water once more and peels away with something silver glinting in her talons. Castiel's gaze tracks the glint as she soars skyward in a wide arc. She's caught a fish. As Anna climbs above the horizon, Uriel lets out an undignified, startled sort of noise and Castiel twists his head around in time to see another angel flash over Uriel's head and land with a careless kind of elegance alongside one of Castiel's wings. Castiel greets Balthazar with a smile and, once he's levered himself into a sitting position, an affectionate bumping of foreheads. Balthazar brought with him a gift, not of food, but of fresh soft moss for the bedding. For a while he helps with the work of weaving the new moss in with the old, but after a few minutes he gets bored and abandons Castiel in favor of pulling at the branches of Uriel’s tree and making it shake, while Uriel sits in the boughs pretending not to notice.

Uriel has just started to growl and swat at Balthazar like an irritable cat when Anna swoops in, laughing and hopping awkwardly on one foot to avoid crushing her speared fish. Balthazar makes a playful grab at Anna's catch; she bats at him with a wing until, laughing in surrender, he drops off the ledge and dives down to the sea. Castiel drops his moss and the fish is set into his open hands. He hadn't realized how hungry he was until he had fresh fish in his fingers, still twitching weakly, bloody where Anna's talons punctured its flesh. He sinks his teeth in without bothering to remove the guts or scales and eats until he's licking scraps of meat from the bones. Then, though Castiel would be content to stretch his wings out and go back to sleep, Anna coaxes him to the edge of the nest and then out into the air. The joy of the salt wind buoying him up is enough to shove the pain in his wings to the back of his mind; he follows Anna as she leads him around the cliff to the wooded slope, feeling light and free.

They skim high above the trees until they dip down to where a stream briefly widens into a cold, clear pool, fringed with ferns and shadowed by the long branches of pine trees. There, Castiel ducks his head and his wings underwater in turn and Anna helps him scrub off the grime of months of captivity spent in a box. She goes over his wings feather by feather, pulling out the broken ones and preening out the messes. By the time she's almost done with the second wing Castiel is feeling so clean and new that his splashes turn playful and Anna also ends up sopping wet and smiling. Together they crawl atop a large rock in a nearby clearing and fan their wings lazily in the sun. Castiel takes hold of Anna's hand as they lie side by side and drifts off back to sleep.

*

His wings grow strong again. Castiel goes out on long flights, soaring high and away from the island until his brethren fade into black dots on the cliff face. He floats on updrafts, the wind in his feathers, the air whipping cold at his face but the sun beating heat down on his wings. He weaves in and out of cloud shadows and breaks into sharp dives toward the sea, hurtling downward like a comet, and snaps his wings out so close to the surface that his talons and the tips of his wings fling up spray behind him. He strains his way back up to thin air and folds his wings and drops again; when he's worked himself into hunger he chases the speedy silver sparkles he can see underwater until he lances a claw in and comes back up with a fish. Perched on his ledge, he savors this kill, and passes a few bites up to Uriel.

Later in the evening, as the sun bleeds red and purple into the horizon, the wind rolls heavy black storm clouds toward the island. Castiel's voice joins the chorus rising from the cliffs, piping a warning song to the others out at sea. One after another, as the clouds gather and crash, angels spiral up from the waves or drop down from where they'd been crawling the cliffs in search of birds' eggs to eat. Uriel clambers down from his tree and fits himself to Castiel's side. Black wings bristle among the cliffs, arched up for shelter. As the wind picks up and the sun sinks down, Anna shoots out of the darkness and lands on their ledge with an armful of fish. They pull her into their huddle and, as one, fold their wings up and around their bodies. Rain lashes the cliffs, carried on a howling wind, and in their makeshift feathery tent, they wait out the storm.

*

When night breaks, the drizzling rain that had been pattering onto the cliffs since evening disperses into a cold white mist. Castiel stays where he's lying on his stomach, pressed against Anna's side on their moss bedding, Uriel on her other side, all of them warm under a solid blanket of wing. Underneath the flat gray sky, the cliffs are quiet and still; the occasional mournful cry of a lonesome angel and the slap of waves against rock are caught and muffled in the fog. Castiel puts his head down on his arms. Beside him, Anna snuffles a little in her sleep.

As the sun climbs to its zenith, the clouds break into disparate fluffy clumps and the mist hanging around the cliffs dissipates into the warm air. Sunlight streams down in ribbons of gold to shine on black feathers and glance off the rocks. Immediately, the island comes alive with angels. It seems everyone goes swarming into the air at once. A racing competition spontaneously organizes itself near Castiel's nest. The starting point is the tree where Uriel sits, pointedly ignoring the shenanigans, and the goal is the waterfall thundering downward a few hundred yards along. As two angels race, whooping calls arise from the onlookers clinging to the cliff face, perched on the edge of their nests or circling idly in the air. Castiel beats Rachel and Balthazar by a long shot, but only wins against Anna by the length of his head; she chases him into the spray, chirping laughter.

Then Gabriel drops in from his nest high above, and Balthazar sets up mock-angry squawking. Gabriel is much smaller than any other angel on the island, with powerful, swept-back, flexible wings. He's the only angel who has ever been known to be able to hover, and he promptly wins every race. He leaves Anna and Balthazar impossibly far behind seconds after they've launched from the ledge. Castiel tries hard to beat him; he springs powerfully from the rock and gains a momentary advantage, but Gabriel shoots past him as a black blur less than halfway there and then zips in circles around the waterfall, trilling in a somewhat smug kind of glee, as he waits for Castiel to catch up. The angels watching from the air and the cliff whistle in admiration. When they get back to the ledge, Balthazar leaps off the cliff for another chance at Gabriel.

As Castiel watches Balthazar, having lost again, pursue Gabriel around the waterfall, he becomes aware of a hush falling downward, dampening, like heavy snow, the raucous noises on the island. He swoops out of the air and settles on the cliff face near his nest, claws on hands and feet dug into the rock. Then he looks up. A dark shadow is descending in a sedate spiral from the very top of the island, where cliff meets cloud, where no angels live but two. Wherever the angel passes, he leaves a wake of silence behind him. The quiet drapes down like a veil as the angels see who it is gliding past them.

It's not often that Lucifer comes down from his cave.

By the time Lucifer has drifted down to the area where the race is taking place, such an intense silence holds sway over the entire cliff that it seems even the sounds of the surf have faded away. Castiel's breath catches in his throat as Lucifer lands, unhurriedly, on his nest ledge. Castiel, from where he's pressed to the cliff above and to the side of his nest, can see Uriel crouched stiffly in the foliage of his tree, every muscle rigid. But what brings the ice to Castiel's blood is Anna, sharing the ledge with Lucifer, kneeling in the bedding behind him, with her wings bundled to her back in fear.

Lucifer stands tall and fans out his magnificent wings – half again as large as Castiel's, every feather neat and glossy black. His wingspan obscures Anna from view. The angels arrayed on the cliffs watch in silence. He snaps his wings closed with a thump of air as loud as a rock crashing to earth. Then he reaches back, seizes Anna by the wrist, and hauls her up.

Castiel jerks hard in startlement before he manages to wrench back the impulse to launch himself at Lucifer. Feathers bristle up all over his wings. He stares at Anna; her face is carefully relaxed into an expression of calm. She looks up and meets his gaze, steady.

Lucifer yanks her to her feet. And then all he does is jerk his head at the waterfall, click a sharp command, and plunge into the air.

Anna is shell-shocked and wobbly in the air and loses the first race even more badly than she would have anyway. In a game with Lucifer, winning is the most dangerous thing any angel could do. As Lucifer selects Rachel from the crowd still grouped around the ledge, Castiel, making sure Lucifer isn't looking his way, shimmies down the cliff, jumps down beside Anna, pulls her to the bedding, and starts worriedly preening her wings. Rachel allows Lucifer to speed ahead of her and slips away as soon as he hits the waterfall. Balthazar is pulled from the crowd next and loses quickly, with lazy flaps of his wings. Lucifer even forces Uriel off his tree and into a race, though he only bothers going halfway before turning back to his beloved tree. After each victory, Lucifer makes a proud loop through the air, exulting in his own excellence.

When Castiel’s turn comes, he makes sure to fall a generous distance behind Lucifer as they wing their way to the waterfall. Lucifer is faster than he is, but not by much, and it’s important not to make the race too close. He glides back to Anna as soon as he can.

The last angel to be forced into the sky for a race that day is Gabriel. The two of them explode outward toward the water and Castiel waits for Gabriel’s expected failure but fear begins to coil in his belly when Gabriel, always quick as lightning, always arrogant, faster than his bulkier opponent, speeds ahead. He leaves a long strip of empty sky between himself and Lucifer. He arrives at the waterfall long before Lucifer and tauntingly flies loops through the sky.

Lucifer doesn’t like losing. They all know that. Gabriel should have known better.

Lucifer tackles Gabriel in midair and his weight sends Gabriel crashing down onto the rocks. All over the nearby cliff, angels shriek and scatter in every direction. Gabriel’s back takes the brunt of the fall. Castiel hears things (bones, feathers, cartilage) snap and crack. He thinks it’s over, but Lucifer’s rage is uncontainable, like the fire in the sun and moon. Lucifer clasps his hands together, raises them above his head, and slams them downwards, clubbing Gabriel repeatedly in the face. The bones in Gabriel’s face smash and collapse. Under the storm of blows his nose is crushed into flatness and his cheekbones cave in. Lucifer’s snarls of anger and Gabriel’s moans of pain are the only sounds in the dead quiet.

Gabriel’s feathers are matted, soaked with blood. A whistling sound comes from his nose as he breathes. Lucifer’s white hands are bloody, like he just gutted an entire school of fish. He finally stops his assault on Gabriel’s face. Now that he’s finished, Gabriel’s features are smashed beyond recognition. Despite their healing capabilities, Castiel knows Gabriel will never look the same again.

Lucifer crows at Gabriel. His cry is one of victory. But he isn’t done inflicting damage yet.

Lucifer puts one foot on Gabriel’s left wing, near where it connects to the muscles in Gabriel’s back and shoulder. With his hands, Lucifer grabs Gabriel’s wing and pulls against the pressure of his foot. Gabriel’s wing breaks, and then, in a feat of brute strength, Lucifer rips most of Gabriel’s wing clean away, leaving only a bloody, feathered stump an arm’s length in diameter.

Lucifer lets out a proud, joyous screech. Anna tucks herself under Castiel’s wing, shivering, and Castiel looks away, watching as Gabriel’s blood dribbles over the edge of the cliff and splashes into the sea.

*

For thousands of years, Castiel has needed nothing more for perfect contentment than flight, fish, and the company of his brethren; still, after weeks back home, he finds his mind wandering back to land. So Castiel rises with the dawn, disentangles himself from Anna, and slips over the edge of the nest into the thin morning air.

Hunting in woodland provides challenges to creatures of Castiel's wingspan, but it can be done. Castiel alights on a pine tree a mile deep in a coastal forest, on the edge of a meadow but far from the path of any wandering humans, and there, obscured among the shadowy boughs, he settles into absolute stillness. The sounds of the forest trickle into his ears. Birds chirp in the green haze under the canopy and insects and squirrels scuttle about his tree. Small things scurry through the underbrush. It's on these that Castiel focuses his attention with the pure concentration of a predator in wait. He sits poised on his branch like an overgrown hawk and pinpoints mice and voles snuffling their way over the forest floor, deer picking their way through the trees, and a hedgehog huddled under a bush – too small, too big, and too much trouble.

Castiel's wings have begun to protest being bunched against his back by the time he finally hears the distinctive soft crunching noises of some kind of rabbit hopping over fallen pine needles. A large wild hare, straying in from the open field, pokes its head out of a clump of ferns beyond the next tree. Castiel spreads his wings so slowly even he can barely hear the feathers rasping against one another. The hare puts its head down to nibble at a spear of grass. Castiel slips off his branch and glides as silent as a shadow to the next tree. He latches onto the bark and, clinging high up to the side of the tree, waits for the hare to pick its way a little closer to him. In the open, the hare could elude him long enough to get to a burrow. Hemmed in by trees, Castiel has the advantage.

The hare snuffles its way over to Castiel's side of the tree and, before it can see him, he plunges out of the tree like a bolt of lightning. He has his claws in his prey before it can do more than startle. Birds shriek and scatter out of the trees and the forest falls abruptly silent; the smell of blood wafts up from the mass of matted fur Castiel has pinned into the soil.

He doesn't stick around to enjoy his meal there. The smell of blood could attract things he doesn't feel like killing, and Anna and Uriel would enjoy sharing the rare treat of fresh meat. Even angels can grow tired of fish. Castiel launches himself off the ground and into the clear sunlight above the trees. The morning matured into a sunny afternoon while he hunted in the shadows beneath the canopy, and Castiel does a loop in the air to see the hot blue sky arc overhead. As he swings over the meadow on his way back to the sea, something glittering in the grass below catches his eye. He looks down and, for a moment, sees a small human girl, wearing a blue cotton dress with polished brass buttons, standing alone among yellow wildflowers. Then Castiel is over the treetops and the child is gone.

The shore is already behind him when the image of the child rises in Castiel's mind. He pushes it away, but it pops right back up again. A little child alone in the meadow. What was she doing out there so far from other humans? He shoves the thought away with an irritable shake of his head. But in its wake come memories of the children he saw while imprisoned in that cage, the ones who would goggle at him with wonder through the bars, Ben laughing as his mother watched him toddle around the yard, Dean's face as he remembered his son –

Castiel growls deep in his throat and, without understanding why, banks sharply and wings his way back to the meadow. He has a fresh catch growing less fresh in his talons and no real idea of what he'll do when he finds the child, but he flies back over the miles he just traveled, over the trees where he caught the hare and finally over the clearing.

And it's empty.

He circles the meadow twice. The child is no longer there.

Perplexed, Castiel touches down where the girl had been standing. The grass is crushed all around in meandering, interlocking trails, like she'd paced in circles trying to figure out which way to go. He can see the path where she wandered in from the forest to the south and where she left, headed to the western fringe of trees bordering the meadow. If she walked far enough in that direction she'd reach the sea. Castiel lifts his foot, grabs the hare by the ears and slides it off his talons. Then he picks his way along the trail of trampled grass, wings mantled for balance.

The trail ends abruptly at the tree line. A small cloth bundle lies discarded on the ground, with a little scrap of a dress like a doll might have, a roll of red ribbons similar to those some of the village children wore in their hair, several crabapples, and a handful of berries all spilling into the dirt. It's there that the tracks simply stop. Castiel casts around for more signs of passage through the foliage, but the forest is undisturbed; even the trees don't bear the marks they would if someone had leaped to and then climbed them. Castiel stands with the sun beating down on him, listening to the thrum of the forest, uncertain.

And then he spots it. Where the trail ends is the solitary footprint of another creature, imprinted deep into the loam. Three long furrows radiate forward from a central joint, with a fourth jutting from the back. Each furrow is capped with a deep puncture hole. Although he's already sure, Castiel extends his own foot over the print. The four toes are much longer than his own, and the holes must have been made by talons larger and more wickedly arched, to extend that far from the end of the toe – but an angel stood here. Castiel raises his eyes to the sky as though the black wings would still be visible. Not very long ago, an angel stood here with a human child.

“Emily!” comes a human voice from the woods on the other side of the clearing.

Castiel focuses his attention; at least three humans are roving the forest, shouting “Emily? Emily!” He scales a nearby tree and launches into the air from its upper branches. He skirts far enough to the south that they won't see him pass overhead, then doubles back behind them. A rutted dirt road runs a few minutes' flight east, and on it a black car has been pulled off to sit with two wheels in the wheel track and two on the grassy shoulder. Castiel comes down on a low branch, sits back on his haunches, and stares at the car. Yes, the child had not been alone after all. Most likely they had stopped for some reason and she had wandered too far off and gotten lost.

The presence of the angel is no concern of Castiel's.

Castiel takes to the air. He passes over the field, where the humans are disappearing into the forest on the western side, still calling out the girl’s name. He tightens his hold on the ears of the dead hare, mind full only of the pleasure of flight and the expectation of a good meal.

*

As the days lengthen and the sun grows hot, Balthazar starts bringing them food from the mainland. Every few days he vanishes eastward as the sun approaches the horizon and then lands in Castiel's nest after nightfall, clutching a chicken or a baby goat or some kind of hard-to-find fish or, on one occasion, a hunk of chocolate, which was a delicacy many angels came to the nest to cautiously sample, and which Castiel scarfed down with delight. Most of the time, though, it's just Castiel, Balthazar and Anna, chirping and laughing as their legs dangle over the ledge, handing chunks of bloody meat up to Uriel in his tree.

One night after a few weeks of this, something wakes Castiel from a deep slumber. He keeps his eyes closed, still pressed against Anna, who he can tell by the tension in her body has also been awakened, and just listens. A strange susurrating murmur echoes around the cliff, as though every angel is awake in their nests and hissing or whistling in fear and awe. Castiel opens his eyes.

Edging around the eastern side of the island is a small boat with white sails shining in the moonlight. For a moment, Castiel can't process what he's seeing, and then he too hisses, recoiling toward Anna. Somehow, against all reason, a human has found the island – the island which no human can find unless guided by the stars or an angel.

The impossible boat bobs closer on the black waves. Castiel remembers the cage and finds his feathers bridling. Black wings flutter off the cliff and vanish into the night sky as a few angels take flight in panic. With a soft rush of air, Balthazar drops in from above, landing with a disorganized clatter of talons on the stone in front of their bedding. Uriel snarls and crooks his fingers threateningly as one of Balthazar's feet comes down too close to his face, but Castiel and Anna both sit up and look at Balthazar questioningly. Balthazar has hunched down into himself, wide-eyed, and shivers rattle his feathers.

Castiel cranes his neck upward to look at the top of the cliff and sees an angel slip out over the edge of the plateau. He nudges Anna and she, too, looks upward; together they watch the angel fly into Lucifer's cave. A moment later two dark forms emerge from the dark cave mouth.

Michael and Lucifer are coming.

They take a sharp spiraling course downward and the susurrating sound fades into silence as they pass. A few yards above Castiel's nest, Michael slows in the air, and behind him Lucifer slows too, watching Michael attentively. The spiral is wider and slower now. Michael is searching for something. Balthazar huddles to the ground. Castiel stays where he'd sat up on his knees, wings to his back and hands folded in his lap. He doesn't dare move.

Michael levels out of his spiral near their nest. His gaze locks on Balthazar.

Balthazar panics and bursts into the air, but he only manages a few wingstrokes before Lucifer crashes into him and hurls him out of the sky and back down on Castiel's ledge. Castiel, Anna and Uriel all leap up the cliff as Lucifer wrestles the wildly thrashing Balthazar into stillness on the rock. Michael settles on Uriel's tree (and Uriel is not too cowed to growl quietly), and watches Balthazar struggle with no expression on his face. Balthazar buffets at Lucifer with his wings even after Lucifer has his limbs locked down, but when Lucifer sets his teeth in Balthazar's throat Balthazar gives up all at once. His wings go limp against the stone floor.

Lucifer removes his teeth from Balthazar's neck, lips red with blood, and glances up at Michael. Michael nods his approval and Lucifer beams with pride. His wings fluff up in happiness. Underneath him, Balthazar's chest heaves with his terrified panting.

Michael launches from the tree and dives down to the ship. He becomes a dark smudge, almost impossible to see, as he lands on deck. Castiel watches over his shoulder. More tiny figures arrive on deck and, one by one, disappear overboard into the ocean or collapse to the ground. The shape that is Michael vanishes into the cabin. Castiel hears the distant report of gunshots, and then it's silent for a long time. Finally, Michael reappears, scales the mast and rips the sail to shreds. When he leaves, winging his way straight up the cliff, there is no movement on the boat. It drifts idly, crippled, in the current, which carries it slowly and inexorably toward the rocks.

As he flies up the cliff, Michael starts to sing. It's a mournful song, a song that sets coldness in the bones, a song that every angel knows. Without a sound, without protest, Castiel and his nestmates detach themselves from the cliff and join the swell of angels rising upward like a wave after Michael. Every angel leaves its nest. The rustle of a thousand wings drowns out the sound of the sea. They soar up along the cliff and over the plateau, the flat roof of the cliff that stretches for hundreds of yards in every direction, the place where Michael roosts. Castiel and the other angels land like a storm of crows on the plateau, filling it one end to the other, arrayed in a circle centered on a tiny, circular spring ringed with black lilies.

The spring's waters are clear and deep. It glistens under the starlight. The surface of the water is crowded with curled black petals, taken from many lilies over many years, that leak their poison into the spring. The wide flat space around the spring is empty of angels except Michael, who stands with quiet patience in wait of Lucifer. There is no sound on the plateau but the occasional clicking of talons against rock and the shuffle of wings.

Then Lucifer rises over the edge of the cliff with Balthazar in tow, his wrists clenched tight in Lucifer's feet. Balthazar is dead weight. He glides behind Lucifer with an expression of shocked numbness, and when Lucifer lets go of his wrists to land in front of Michael, he simply falls beside him – and waits. Something cold and heavy settles in Castiel's chest. His hand finds Anna's.

Michael places both his hands on top of Balthazar's head and forces him to kneel. Balthazar goes to his knees easily, head bowed, arms limp. Michael's hands curve around his cheeks, and then he once again begins to sing.

This song is different – it's a pure, loud, singular note, and it has a strong and immediate effect on Balthazar. He trembles under Michael's hands and his wings twitch uncontrollably. It goes on and on as Michael rifles through Balthazar's mind, until Castiel thinks he can no longer stand the sight of Balthazar shaking, and then Michael's song changes, turns higher, sharper. The memories Michael took from Balthazar flood out over every angel there. The plateau and his brethren and Balthazar trembling before Michael all vanish from Castiel's sight. Instead, what he sees, as though he were in Balthazar’s place, is Balthazar's own memory of arriving at a human's farm as the sun sets; stealing small animals out of their pens, barn and coops; climbing into the farmhouse through an open window one evening it was empty; and finally Balthazar looking under his body as he flew to see the farmers giving pursuit in their boat, and rising higher into the clouds, thinking he'd lost them. But he had not. He was brazen and stole openly from humans, and he had put the entire island at risk.

Castiel's hand tightens around Anna's.

Michael waits a moment for the surprised shuffling of many taloned feet to die away into a solemn hush. Then he stalks to the edge of the spring and dips the claws on his right hand into the water.

Balthazar, overcome with terror, begins to struggle again as Michael draws near with dripping claws, but just one of Lucifer's hands gripping the back of his neck is enough to keep him on his knees. It doesn't quiet his desperate squawking, though, and the sounds tear at Castiel's insides. Michael puts his left hand into Balthazar's hair and tips his head back, exposing his throat in a long fragile white curve. Castiel wants to hide his head in his wing but cannot look away.

A single swipe of Michael’s talons slices through Balthazar’s throat. Balthazar makes a choking noise as blood bubbles and steam hisses from the wound. He collapses at Michael's feet. A severed jugular isn’t enough to kill an angel, but the poison of the black lilies is working through his body now, and he jerks and moans in agony as a pool of blood, shining dark red in the night, spreads out below his body and smears in his feathers. Balthazar twitches weakly one final time, caught in the last spasms of death, and then falls still.

Michael raises his voice in the mourning cry, and Lucifer's voice joins him – one after another, each angel cries out its grief over losing one of their own. The night fills to the stars with the sound of their mourning.

When the song has faded away, Michael and Lucifer, with great care, more than Castiel would expect, lift Balthazar’s body into their arms. They carry it up into the air and far enough out away from the cliff that it won't snag on any trees or ledges, and then they let it fall.

Balthazar falls fast, out of sight, and the sea is so far below Castiel doesn't even hear the splash. Their mourning, unified, lasts for only a few seconds longer before they drift apart and away, on to their own nests and corners of the island. Life continues for them. There are things to hunt and places to fly, the warmth of the sun on the backs of their black wings.

*

On his plateau, empty except for the pool of blood that the rain will eventually wash away, Michael sinks down into the bed of moss that spills out from under an overhanging rock. There, he picks up the small, square, metal object he'd rescued from the ship. It had caught his eye, gleaming silver in a spatter of gore, as he ripped out the last human's throat. Now it glows with reflected starlight between the bloodstains as it lies in the palm of his hand.

Michael wipes off some of the blood with the pad of his thumb. In the pale light of the moon, he can make out the word _Winchester_ carved into the metal.

Small pipes and a little lever protrude from the top of the object. Michael taps the lever with a claw. It creaks a little, and shifts. Cautiously, Michael pinches the lever between his thumb and forefinger and gives it a twist.

A small yellow flame shoots from the end of the pipe.

Michael startles but keeps his grip on the object. He arches his wings behind him, far away from the fire, and lifts the lighter higher. It throws shadows and flickering light, ghoulish and strange under the open black sky, dancing around the rocky hollow in which Michael keeps his bed. He twists the lever back the other way. The little flame shudders and dies. He turns the lever again and the orange firelight springs up around him once more.

When he’s finished toying with it, Michael stows the lighter in a deep recess under the overhang, far from the wind and rain.

*

Angels aren't the only creatures who make their homes in the lonely heights of the cliffs. Sea birds and even lizards construct their nests in whatever small crevices or outcroppings they can find. In the egg-laying season, angels who don't want to dive to the sea to fish scale the cliff face, poking about the rocks and tough plants clinging to the stone, though they leave at least one egg in each nest they find. Not long after Balthazar's execution, Castiel takes to crawling the cliffs for eggs.

He climbs up past Balthazar's old nest, where his bedding lies in a sad green heap, tangled into disarray by weather and neglect. Balthazar lived alone; the time of respect for the dead will be over soon, and some angel eager to find a space away from its nestmates will claim this ledge as its own. Castiel climbs on. The breeze ruffles his feathers and carries on it the distant cries of his brethren, like lonesome gulls, and the crash of the sea. Castiel fastens all four sets of talons into holds in the rock and leans back into the wide open air, spreading his wings to catch the sun and the wind. The world falls away behind him, a bright blue sphere of sea and sky.

Castiel crawls upward, aiming for dark crevices and outcroppings fringed with twigs. He finds abandoned nests from years gone by, nests already robbed of most of their eggs by other angels, and nests filled with bald, chirping baby birds, guarded by a zealous mother. Castiel rises high up, past the forlorn ledge where Gabriel lies curled on his side, his ruined face turned toward the cliff, what's left of his mangled wing tucked under his body. He ignores Castiel's tentative call of greeting.

Above Gabriel's ledge, Castiel finds a gull nest with three brown, speckled eggs nestled in a lining of moss and seaweed. He pops one of the eggs in his mouth for easy transport and takes another in his hand, with the vague thought of leaving it for Gabriel. As Castiel brings up his legs to push himself backward off the cliff, he catches a flash of something shiny and colorful in the edges of his vision. He tilts his head back and scans the cliff. There – above him and to the left, something red, a more vivid red than the feather of any bird, is fluttering in the gnarly branches of a bush.

Curiosity piqued, Castiel puts the second egg back with its sibling and clambers up toward the strange red thing. As he crawls closer, he can make out a rustling sound, like cloth being whipped around in the wind. And indeed, that is it what it resembles; a scarlet scrap of cloth, snagged in the leaves. He pulls himself up beside the scrawny little bush and is halfway through reaching for it when he realizes –

What's caught in the twigs of the bush, snapping to and fro in the salty sea breeze, is a child's red hair ribbon. Just like those worn by the children in the village, and just like Castiel saw on the mainland not too long ago, lying in the dirt beside an angel's footprint. There's no way the wind could have brought it here from land, not so far, not so high. He had dismissed the idea then, but now he knows: an angel has taken a child to the cliffs.

*

Castiel found the ribbon a hundred feet above his own nest, but the wind could have carried it from anywhere on the island before it finally snarled in the twigs of the bush. A strange, deep anxiety drives Castiel now. He has to know where the child is, and he starts by circling around the island to the place where something the size of a small human would be easiest to hide: the wooded slopes behind the cliffs. He glides above the streams and pools where a child would be most likely to come in search of water; he pokes his head into the few caves large enough to shelter someone from the weather; he skims in a slow spiral over the whole of the forest, looking for a footprint, a few threads of clothing caught on some brambles, anything. His last resort is checking for angels looking suspicious, but the few he finds have come to bask on the broad white rocks or splash around in a creek, and they sing out greetings to him as he passes overhead. No one is here.

Castiel returns to his nest with the cold feeling of foreboding in his belly heavier than ever. He's not in the mood to hunt. Exasperated and confused by his own worry, he goes dashing through the spray of the waterfalls, but the icy water on his face and feathers does little to clear his mind. He sits on the bedding with his wings wrapped around him, staring out along the cliffs as though the child might appear there, until the sky goes dark and the stars begin to glimmer overhead.

As soon as the clouds in the east lighten to gray, crumpled like a broad silk sheet, Castiel slips off the ledge, leaving Anna and Uriel cheeping sleepily and shivering in the sudden cold, and dives. He falls past nests filled with his brethren, still curled up and sleeping, looking like little more than dark piles of feathers, blurred with speed. He levels out when he hits the last nests above the sea, several hundred feet below his own. The water is black and deep and still below the moonless sky. The sound of his claws dislodging pebbles as he lands vertically on the cliff face spreads wide in the early morning quiet.

Castiel begins to climb.

Under the pretense of searching for bird eggs, he edges along the cliff face, peering into nests, making sure no one has the child hidden under a wing or in a crevice. He crawls the cliffs until the last of the light fades from the west and then in the morning he flies to the place where he left off. He does this for four days, until he has risen past Rachel's nest, past his own nest, where Anna watches him worriedly, past Balthazar's old nest, now occupied by two other angels, past the nest where Gabriel still lies curled into himself, and to the broad expanse of empty cliff marred near the top by the dark mouth of a cave.

Here, Castiel stops, looking upward, hanging off the cliff. The wind whistles an eerie tune as it slides along the bare rock. No angels but two are permitted higher than this, except for ceremonies such as executions or to report wrongdoing to Michael, and Castiel doesn't know the punishment for an unlawful ascent because no one has ever tried. But with the world falling into blue twilight as the sun slips below the sea, perhaps Lucifer is snug in his cave, and Michael on his plateau, and Castiel could survive this.

He whistles a quiet note of irritation at himself and slowly, carefully, grips a handhold above his head. The angels in the nests below him to either side sleep without stirring as Castiel crawls hand over hand up the cliff, body pressed flat to the rock, careful not to send a single pebble skittering downward.

The moon has risen into the black of the high sky by the time Castiel has gone up less than fifty feet, and it's by the light of the moon that he finds the doll, lodged in the deep shadows of a crevice in the rock wall. Its little canvas body, washed silver in the moonlight, feels soft on his fingertips as he plucks it from its hiding place. The doll is naked. Along with her hair ribbons, its owner left its dress in the dirt on the edge of a meadow.

The dread in Castiel's stomach knots into a stone so heavy it threatens to pull him from the cliff. The doll could only have fallen from one place; Castiel can imagine Michael abducting a human as easily as he can Dean learning to fly. This makes obvious what Castiel was so afraid he already knew, confirms the knowledge that drove him to spend four days scouring the cliffs in search of any other answer.

Clinging on to the cliff face with one hand, the doll clutched in the other, Castiel raises his eyes to the gaping mouth of Lucifer's cave.

*

Instead of venturing into the cave while Lucifer is sleeping inside, Castiel glides back down to his own nest, where he dozes fitfully, tucked against Anna, and wakes before dawn. He keeps his gaze fastened to the high cliff as the sky lightens from navy to a delicate blue, spotted with clouds striped pink and gray. Anna rises and performs short dives in front of the ledge, trying to persuade Castiel to come down to the water with her, but eventually leaves without him. Late in the morning, Uriel finally gets up, stretches his legs, shakes out his feathers, and flaps up to his tree, where he proceeds to ignore Castiel entirely. The day wears on until, in the afternoon, Castiel sees a black shape glide out of the thin dark scar in the rock that is the cave mouth and disappear around the edge of the cliff to the other side of the island.

Castiel bolts into the air but, as much as he wants to power straight upward, the need for secrecy is greater than his desire for speed. This will be over very quickly if Michael catches him. Castiel strikes out away from the cliff and soars upward in a gentle arc so wide it takes him around the cliff to the slopes, high above the trees, where Lucifer has already vanished from the sky. His spiral lifts him around to the very fringe of the cliff a hundred feet above the highest line of nests. He lands catlike on the cliff and pauses there, silent, waiting to see if anyone has noticed him. Far below, angels dive and tumble through the air, raising the usual cacophony of cries, song, and whistles; above, no movement stirs on the edges of Michael's plateau.

Stealthily, Castiel steals along the cliff, moving with as much quiet care as he had the other night. It takes him a full hour to make his way to the cave, and when he gets there, he hangs below the lip for a moment, taking deep breaths to steady himself. The cave’s rugged roof arches above him, ominous, sheltering deep shadows within. There's no going back from here.

Castiel pulls himself up and into Lucifer's cave.

At first glance, the image the cave presents is of a certain neat emptiness. Shafts of light slant in from outside and fall onto the smooth stone floor, bare of dirt or grit. The wide flat space ends in a jumble of big rocks, and a few yards from the entrance the walls grow jagged and pitted with shadowy crevices. Castiel's talons clack on the stone as he picks his way over to the rocky area. A huge woven pad of moss and leaves fills a depression hemmed in by rocks, far enough back from the cave entrance to be protected from any unwelcome incursions of wind or rain. The sounds of the sea and the songs of the angels are dampened into heavy silence as Castiel skirts around Lucifer's bedding. Castiel clambers up a boulder at the back of the depression and looks around. The cave extends a long way into the cliff, lengthening into inky blackness, ground increasingly heaped with a mess of rocks. Castiel risks a quiet whistle and listens to it echo back at him from the depths of the cave. He glides down from the boulder, landing with a quiet click of talons. The rush of wind from his wings stirs up dust into the air.

In the dimness, near where Castiel touched down, he can make out a small pile of strange things obscured behind a large stone, some of them glinting in the faint light. He casts a glance over his shoulder to make sure the bright sky visible through the cave opening is still clear before he squats down to poke through them.

Resting on its own bed of moss is a pile of treasure from the human world. Fascinated, Castiel lifts out a small tin pot, complete with a lid; a silver locket that he opens to find a photograph, yellowed with time, of a light-haired girl with her mother and stern-eyed balding father; a little book of prayers; old, moldy candies; a figure of a dog whittled out of wood; and sundry other items that Castiel inspects in turn, all things that could be found in a child's pocket or bags. He puts it all aside and studies the lumpy mound of moss. There's something either under it or wrapped up inside it. He digs his fingers in and parts it to make a hole and his heart begins to rabbit in his chest. Beneath the moss is a blue cotton dress, crusted with dried bloodstains, and below that, something white –

It's only Castiel's thousands upon thousands of years of hunting, of sitting in absolute silence with his whole body attuned to the smallest of sounds, that saves him. He hears the whistle of wings outside the cave before it's too late, and before he consciously processes what he's heard his hands are out of the moss and he's thrown himself into a crevice in the wall, narrow but deep, filled with blackness thicker than night.

Lucifer's talons click, click on the ground as he lands, and his wings rustle loudly in the stillness. Castiel has his back plastered to one side of the crevice and the other wall cuts off all but a thin slice of the cave, but his terror intensifies his hearing, and every sound Lucifer makes rings out like a bell; the shuffle of his wings, the strange crooning song he's singing, the sound of his talons as he walks closer.

Castiel's stomach has clenched tight and his mouth is dry and the blood in his veins feels as though it has suddenly transformed into icewater as Lucifer sidles around the rocks. At any moment, Lucifer will come into view of the crevice, and the shadows won't be thick enough, he'll spot the light glimmering on the wings Castiel has wrapped around himself, or see the flash of pale skin on his legs or face, or hear his heartbeat hammering, and then he will drag Castiel out of his hiding place and rip him to pieces.

Instead, as Lucifer edges into view, Castiel forgets his fear in a surge of shock.

Lucifer is wearing a full suit – a black tailcoat over a black low-cut waistcoat and stiff white cotton shirt. He'd look like a well-dressed human male if not for the bare, scaly eagle feet sticking out from the bottom of his black dress pants and his enormous wings, which have to mean most of the back of his coat and shirt have been cut away. Castiel is so distracted with seeing Lucifer dressed so bizarrely – never mind dressed at all – that it takes him a moment to notice the small boy, not more than four years old, cradled in Lucifer's arms, face tucked into his chest, little arms curled around his neck. The fear returns in a horrible rush, but this time Castiel isn't afraid for himself.

Lucifer settles down on a rock with the boy in his lap, out of Castiel's line of sight except for the curve of one black wing, his shoulder and the edge of his blond head. He chirps a cheery tune and Castiel sees him lift a wooden toy horse out of his pocket before his hand disappears from view. The child giggles. They play together; Castiel listens to Lucifer's teasing whistles and the boy's happy laughter, and every so often one of the kid's arms comes waving into the slice of cave that Castiel can see.

Then there's a ripping noise, and the child gives a startled yelp of pain. Lucifer croons a consolatory, apologetic note, and after a moment of hesitant silence, the boy giggles again, forgiving him easily. The sounds of play resume. Lucifer's visible wing has arched in pleasure.

A second tearing sound and cry echo in the cave. Lucifer makes his soothing noises again, but this time there's no reciprocating laughter from the child – only tense, untrusting silence. In his crevice, Castiel's hands curl into fists, claws digging into the calloused flesh of his palm.

Lucifer hurts the child a third time, and a struggle erupts out of Castiel's eyesight. The child is shouting and crying, fighting to get free of Lucifer's grip, and Lucifer slides off the rock, pinning the writhing boy to the ground. Castiel sees Lucifer's back with the wings mantled toward the roof and his shoulders working as he works to contain the boy, with the child's legs kicking out to the side. Finally, there's a sharp crack and the boy screams and stills, panting.

Lucifer tortures the child for a long while. Castiel turns his head and closes his eyes when he can no longer bear the sight of the boy's legs twitching helplessly, but he can't block out the high, whining screams or the sobbing. He tries to focus on the pain of his own claws cutting into his hand or the places where his feathers are jammed uncomfortably against the rough stone wall, but the noises go on and on and on, until Castiel thinks he might lose his reason and go bursting out of the crevice to deliver a mercy blow and end the child's life himself. Then, at long last, Lucifer appears to grow bored, and there's another crack, and the screams abruptly end.

Castiel stands still in his shadows, trembling against his will, hoping that Lucifer will leave. But Lucifer doesn't leave. There's a long wet tearing noise, and then chewing. Lucifer is eating the boy's body.

Castiel presses his face into his feathers and just waits for it to be over.

It seems like hours, but in the end Lucifer does eat his fill, and stands up, stretching out his arms and wings with a certain satisfaction. He turns around, and for the first time Castiel sees his face. The blood smeared around his mouth doesn't mask his expression of contentment and joy. He looks downward and plucks at his suit; the sleeves and legs are sopping wet, dripping red, and his black talons have gone scarlet with blood. His hands and arms are stained red past the point where they vanish into his sleeves. Castiel holds his breath, still as stone, and it suddenly occurs to him that Lucifer might go and place a memento from _this_ kill into his pile of the belongings of previous victims – the pile that Castiel scattered all over place, that's clear evidence of his presence in the cave. But Lucifer wanders no further back. Rather, he shakes out his wings in a gesture of finality and stalks toward the cave mouth. A moment later, Castiel hears him dropping into the air, most likely to go pinken the waters of a creek as he washes.

Castiel stays where he is until he feels safe that Lucifer isn't going to come swooping back, and then he tumbles into the cave, gasping in great gulps of air. He sits crouched behind a boulder until his hands stop shaking. Logically, he knows there's nothing he could have done, that if he had come out of his hiding place to fight Lucifer, the child would have died anyway; it's just that Lucifer would have killed Castiel first, and then no one would know about this and no one could stop him. But as Castiel steadies himself behind the boulder, what he remembers is the other boy, the one whose name he learned was Ronald Kopeki, who died under Dean's hands after Castiel's talons had split open his stomach, and for the first time, Castiel truly understands Dean's rage.

Castiel can't bring himself to go near the half-devoured body of the nameless child sprawled in a pool of his own blood, but he lunges at the pile of moss and tears at it until he's fully unearthed the bloody dress and the heap of tiny white bones that lie beneath. Castiel seizes [a little yellowed skull](http://pics.livejournal.com/whisperelmwood/pic/0002fc28) and takes a running leap, flying before he's even fully out of the cave. He killed Ronald Kopeki, and he couldn't save the girl in the field nor the boy in the cave, but he will die before he lets Lucifer kill again.

Castiel swings straight up to Michael's plateau.

*

Castiel falls to his knees, bows his head, spreads his wings along the ground in a gesture of submission, and presents the skull to Michael.

The clouds behind and above Michael glow a savage red with the light of the sunset as he frowns down at Castiel. Castiel waits, heartbeat jumping in his throat. He's well aware that this could go terribly wrong. Michael loves Lucifer far more than he cares about the welfare of humanity, and perhaps is more dedicated to him than protecting the secrecy of their society, and though Castiel is relatively sure Michael wouldn't kill him here, quietly, to protect Lucifer's secret, he could refuse to do anything about it – which would be tantamount to ordering Castiel's death, once Lucifer found out about his meddling.

Michael's hands descend to frame Castiel's face, fingers resting lightly on his temples and palms on his cheeks, and Castiel can't help but close his eyes as the pure high note of Michael's song hits his ears. For a moment, it feels as though there's a cold wind rushing inside his skull, and then the memories Michael is calling well up in Castiel's mind. Castiel knew this was coming and tried to organize everything into some kind of coherency, and he has enough control that the first thing Michael sees is the little girl standing in her blue dress in the field, then a glimpse of the fallen bag and Lucifer's footprint in the soil. Flashes of the red ribbon in the bush, Castiel crawling the cliffs, and the doll in the crack come spilling out of Castiel's mind and into Michael's. Then a wave of nausea rises in Castiel as Michael finds the hours he spent in a crevice listening to Lucifer murder a child, and here the images slow to a crawl, as though Michael is studying each small moment in disbelief, trying to find the trick or the lie. Castiel hangs, a captive in his own head, until all of a sudden the barrage of memories stops and Michael's presence is gone from his mind. Castiel collapses forward onto his hands, feeling suddenly clammy and shaky, and the skull goes rolling across the stone and comes to a halt with its lurid grin to the crimson sky. Sweat plasters Castiel's hair to his damp forehead.

When he feels steady enough to sit back on his knees again, Michael is pacing to and fro among the long blue shadows cast by the sinking sun, feathers bristled in distress. Castiel waits where he is.

It isn't too long before Michael stops, abruptly, like he arrived at a decision all at once, whistles a sharp note of command at Castiel, and jerks his head at a pile of rocks. Castiel makes his way over to the pile and sinks down out of the ruddy sunlight. Tiny gaps between the rocks leave a small amount of visibility. Michael disappears to the overhang where he keeps his bedding, and rifles around in there before reappearing in one of the holes. He perches on the edge of his plateau, overlooking the setting sun and the shining sea. Once Castiel is hidden out of sight, wings folded around him, Michael lets out a sweet cry that must be audible throughout most of the high reaches of the island and goes on for far longer than Castiel would have breath to sustain it. Finally the call dies down into a quavering echo, and Michael stands in perfect stillness, framed against the cherry sky.

It's only moments later that Lucifer lands in a thump of wings, properly naked and clean, with the sunset bringing red highlights gleaming in his feathers. He cocks his head curiously at Michael. In response, Michael raises an eyebrow at the sky, smiles, and spreads his wings. Even from Castiel's view through a hole in the rocks, the expression of pure adoration that radiates across Lucifer's face is plain to see. He chirrups in happy acquiescence and the two of them take off into the darkening sky.

Castiel remains crouched on the plateau for a minute, watching the two black figures shrink into the distance. Then he slips into the air, wings his way high into the clouds, and follows.

*

Invisible in the clouds, dipping down every so often to make sure he hasn't lost them, Castiel pursues Michael and Lucifer across the sea.

They cut directly east, headed into the gathering darkness, and they act exactly like Castiel and Anna might on a playful romp through the night sky; diving in tandem to the surface of the sea, racing each other back up. When the ragged dark line of the forested mainland coast becomes visible on the horizon, they swing to the south, and so, up in the clouds, does Castiel.

True night falls, and the dark high dome above Castiel begins to twinkle with stars. Michael and Lucifer become black silhouettes against black water. Castiel risks dropping below the clouds, and is startled to find himself approaching a familiar hunk of land, a solid mass in the silky movement of the dark sea, dotted with the golden lights of human settlement – Dean's island.

*

Michael knows this: he could never choose to kill Lucifer. He is the best of his brethren, the brightest star in Michael's sky. Yet he now represents a threat to the existence of Michael's island, and the safety of the island is the one thing Michael would ever prioritize above Lucifer's wellbeing. And so Michael leads his brother to the skies above the human village that successfully caught and contained Castiel, and as they drift high above its forests, he brings out the silver lighter that he's been carrying concealed in his hand since they left the plateau.

And puts it against the feathers of Lucifer's wing, and twists.

For a moment, Lucifer doesn't register the fire licking through his feathers, and when he does, he panics and twists in the air, and Michael slips over him and sets the other wing ablaze. Lucifer screams a scream of terror and, as the flames eat away his pinions, reaches out his hands to Michael.

Michael wants to grab him but does not, and finally the shriveled, smoking ruins of his wings can no longer hold Lucifer up against gravity, and he plummets downward.

Michael would never kill his brother, but he watches him fall like a star from the sky.

*

Dean sits in his kitchen, idly whittling a figurine out of a block of driftwood, when he sees the falling star arcing down like a blaze of white fire, leaving a bright trail in the blackness. Something about it makes him pause, and he gazes out the kitchen window for the moments it takes for the star to crash to the horizon, snuffed out behind the dim outline of the trees.

Dean keeps staring, knife in one hand, figurine in the other.

“Does that look like it landed on the island to you?” he wonders aloud.

The half-carved angel he has in his grip doesn't respond.

*

High above Michael, Castiel sees Lucifer erupt into a fireball and fall into the dark forest.

Shocked, Castiel lingers too long, flying in agitated circles in the nighttime sky above the island. The glow of the inferno that is Lucifer has been extinguished by the blackness under the trees. He doesn’t know if Lucifer survived. Michael has vanished; Castiel glides down above the treetops, searching for some sign of movement. The woods are quiet and still. He circles above them, straining to catch any sound, hearing nothing but the rush of night wind through his own feathers.

Then, in an inky clearing below, light suddenly flares in bright square shapes. A candle has been lit in a window. Castiel swings down lower and glimpses Lucifer, with wings that are shriveled and smoking and burnt jutting behind him and a face consumed with fury, stalking into the golden light spilling from the window, and then vanishing into the darkness like a shadow.

Wood splinters. Someone screams. The dark shape that is Lucifer disappears inside the house. A shotgun blast rings out once, twice -- then silence.

Castiel isn’t fool enough to dive down and fight Lucifer then and there. He swings around north and west and races as fast as he can through the night, flying past the point that his wings start to ache, because he knows that Dean and Sam will be able to capture this injured, flightless Lucifer, but there is no telling how many people he will kill in his rage before they do. He follows the constellations home.

When he reaches the island at last, he doesn’t bother with subtlety. He soars straight into Lucifer’s cave and comes out of the air running. The cave is solid black inside but Castiel doesn’t wait for his eyes to adjust. The corpse of the boy has begun to smell. Castiel throws himself past it and reaches into the pile of stolen items and brings out the tin pot and lid some child was carrying when Lucifer took them. His claws scrape roughly on stone as he flings himself back out into the clear night. Below him, the air is empty, and no wings can be seen swooping above the rolling sea.

Castiel races around to the other side of the island and lands on the straight section of bare cliffs, above the slope, that terminates in Michael’s plateau. He takes the handle of the pot in his mouth and climbs straight up to the edge of the plateau, where he finally slows and cautiously puts his head over. Michael has to have beaten him back, but he can see nothing except a shadowy jumble of rocks. Castiel pulls himself over the edge and crawls, almost on his stomach, with his wings tight to his back, to the nearest boulder. He peeks cautiously around it.

The spring lies in the center of a hundred feet of open space. What he can see of the water beyond the black lilies circling the edge glimmers with patches of silver in the moonlight. Beyond it, Michael sits on a high rock, wings loose at his sides, gazing toward the stars. His back is toward Castiel. Michael’s shoulders are slumped in quiet misery.

Mouth dry, heart thumping, Castiel eases out from behind the rock and starts crawling across the bare arena surrounding the spring. He doesn’t dare put his feet down to the ground, for fear that Michael will hear his talons scraping along the stone; he pushes himself forward with hands and knees, fingers curled into his palm to silence his claws. He’s keenly aware of his back, totally vulnerable, exposed to the starry sky. Every quiet shuffling noise he can’t stop his skin from making against the rock, every feather that rustles against its neighbor, sounds like the crashing of a waterfall to his ears. The moon pins him with its blank white stare. If Michael should abruptly turn around, he’ll see Castiel immediately. He keeps his eyes fastened on Michael, though as he progresses ten, twenty, fifty feet toward the spring, it fades from an unlikelihood to an impossibility that he would be able to get behind a rock in time should it seem like Michael is moving.

He’s staring so hard at Michael that he’s right at the spring before the black lilies loom up in his vision. He freezes with his face almost in the petals.

Castiel raises one careful hand and removes the handle of the pot from his mouth. With his gaze still on Michael’s back, he removes the lid slowly enough to prevent any scraping noise of metal on metal and sets it into the loam around the spring. Carefully, carefully, he dips the pot into the water. The water is black in the darkness; he can barely make out the shapes of the flower petals as they float and drift on the surface like toxic lily pads, solid spots among the glimmers of moonlight. Water fills the pot with a soft gurgling; two petals slip inside. Michael doesn’t move. Castiel lifts the pot out of the water -- droplets cascade down the edges and coalesce in streams at the bottom. He lowers it softly into the dirt and wants to take flight that second but knows he can’t hold the pot safely with its sides wet. Instead, he spends an extra painful minute on full display in the open ground taking handfuls of soil from around the stems of the lilies and soaking up the patches of wetness on its tin sides.

At last, Castiel gently places the lid on the pot. He slides his fingers under the bottom of the pot and presses his thumbs down firmly on the lid so that no water can slip out. On his rock, Michael sighs and stretches out his wings. Ice floods Castiel’s veins. He freezes. But Michael just flexes his wings and then lets them droop down again, still staring mournfully at the stars.

Castiel backs away toward the nearest rock on his knees with his forelegs and the tops of his feet on the ground but his talons clenched upwards into a ball. It seems to take forever, but finally he makes his way back behind the rocks and then off the edge of the cliff. He glides quietly away from the plateau and then, once he’s sure the night has him safely hidden, sets his sights on the stars above Dean’s island.

*

Not even an hour after the star falls to land, a commotion explodes in the village. Dean half-rises out of his chair, listening to the shrill voices and the whinnying of panicked horses. Footsteps and carts go clattering through the streets outside. It sounds like half the population from the other dollops of civilization scattered around the island have come rushing into town at once.

Sam bolts out of his room, wild-haired and bleary-eyed, his long white cotton sleepshirt in disarray. “What?” he demands. “What's happening?”

“By the sound of it?” Dean suggests. “The apocalypse.”

Sam rubs furiously at his eyes and seems to be unable to tell if Dean is joking.

Dean pops his head out the kitchen door. “Hey!” he shouts to the group of terrified civilians dashing down the street outside the side gate. “What the hell is going on?”

“Monster!” responds a panicked wail. “Monster on the cliffs!”

Dean brings his head back inside the house. Sam raises an eyebrow.

“Well, Sammy?” he says, and though it's been a long time since he felt capable of protecting people, beneath the heaviness of worry in his gut, he finds strength he thought he'd forgotten. “Sounds like our kind of work.”

He slings the shotgun and the pistol loaded with silver bullets down from the mantel.

“Get the knives,” Dean says. “Let's go.”

*

Castiel swoops down low over the wharf, where people are milling about in utter chaos, some of them still in their sleeping things, some of them bloodied. A few scream and recoil when they see his shadow darting overhead, but he's already gone, passing over the dark streets and to the edge of the woods, where he flaps his wings backward and alights in the grassy side yard outside Dean's house, where a storm brought him crashing down months ago.

The angel cage hulks, dark and threatening, at the back of the yard, but Castiel ignores it. The window facing the side yard stands open to the warm summer breeze. Castiel carefully places the pot of water on the ground and then scrambles through the window, sending pots and pans and plates clattering to the floor. Many of them shatter. He pauses for a moment to see if the racket has been noticed, but the inside of the house lies quiet in its gray nighttime gloom – empty. Instead of relief, worry spikes in Castiel's stomach. Castiel leaps down from the counter and accidentally knocks the kitchen table over. Something wooden goes skittering under a chair.

Castiel takes a step toward the nearest doorway and his talons slip on the linoleum floor. He throws his wings out for balance and several chairs topple over and a portrait with a glass cover falls and smashes on the ground. Hissing in frustration, Castiel very cautiously places one foot in front of the other, a hand braced on the wall for balance, until he can poke his head inside the nearest door. It leads to a little bedroom with a messy bed tucked into the corner and a gargantuan white shirt thrown on the floor. This room has got to be Sam's. He opens the remaining door and slides into the hallway, gets into the room after Sam’s at the end of the hall, which turns out to be the bathroom, and goes across the hall, where at last he finds the room that is undeniably Dean's. His room boasts an odd combination of an assortment of weapons, lovingly polished and hung on the wall, and children's books and toys, which must have belonged to his son, lined on the top of his bookshelf.

The particular weapon Castiel wants isn't on the wall, but he spots a chest tucked into a corner. His talons leave huge gouges in Dean's wooden floor. Castiel breaks the lock on the chest and finds, placed alongside an array of daggers, precisely what he was looking for: the sword Dean got from a goddess, carved with runes that Dean doesn't understand, but that Castiel can read as saying, simply, _Death_.

Castiel snatches the sword and, rather than fight his way across the linoleum again, he unlatches Dean's bedroom window and springs, with a sense of deep relief, into open night air over the backyard. He glides around to the side of the house to retrieve the pot of water he left outside the kitchen. There, he transfers the sword to his foot, wrapping his toes around the hilt, grips the pot and lid firmly with both hands, and takes to the sky.

Castiel sets his course in a circle around the island, scanning the dark trees for any sign of Sam and Dean, and it's the distant screaming that draws him to them. Far below him, Castiel glimpses flashes of light or white clothing between the trees as people, sobbing, screaming or covered in blood, scramble down the bluff. Castiel tightens his toes around the sword hilt and rises higher on strong wingbeats. Wherever most sane people are running from is sure to be the place Sam and Dean are running to. The eastern sky, behind a black fringe of trees, is lightening to a pale blue as dawn approaches, and in this calm tinted light, he spots them, on the wide open space on top of the cliff that shelters the town. They're two dim shapes advancing on an angel, crouched against the edge of the cliff, ash flaking from its ruined wings.

In midair, already breaking into a dive, Castiel shoves the lid of the pot aside to create a small gap – throws the sword from his foot into his hand – and spills water along the edge of the sword, droplets stinging his skin where the wind flings them into his face. The ground comes rushing up; Castiel hurtles over Sam and Dean's heads and before they can do more than shout in shock Castiel comes screaming out of the sky and slices his sword deep into Lucifer's wing.

Lucifer yelps and throws Castiel off him. Castiel loses the pot of water but manages to tear the sword free from Lucifer's bone as he goes rolling, wings tucked safely to his back. He's barely managed to get to his knees when Lucifer comes bounding at him like a lion – he blindly thrusts the sword out in front of him and it impales Lucifer through the shoulder as he rockets into Castiel. The flesh sizzles where the blade sinks in but Lucifer, screeching in rage, pushes forward, bearing Castiel down to the ground, the long claws on his hands tearing viciously at Castiel's chest and arms. Castiel cries out in pain, wrenching at the sword, trying to slash at Lucifer with his feet, but then two hands grip Lucifer around the neck and yank him off the sword and fling him back.

Dean stands above him, staring down at him with open shock, but behind Dean Lucifer is twisting himself to his feet and Castiel snaps open his wings and goes diving into him. They roll together over the crisp dead grass, and Lucifer claws out a chunk of Castiel's shoulder but Castiel manages to ram the sword at a skewed angle into his side. This time, when he springs away, panting and dripping blood, Lucifer stays on his hands and knees on the ground, gasping for breath, weakened and disoriented.

Castiel sees the tin pot, reflecting light where it's nestled against a thistle, and miraculously, a small pool of water remains trapped in the curve of the side and bottom. As Lucifer struggles to his feet, Castiel dashes over, dips all four sets of talons delicately into the water, and then spills most of the rest on the blade, where the blood staining its length turns pink and runny.

Gunshots crack the air; Sam and Dean are firing their pistols at Lucifer, now on his feet, driving him backward toward the edge of the cliff. Twelve shots ring out and then Dean curses, dropping his pistol in the grass, and Sam fumbles for his shotgun. Castiel whistles, a short sharp note, and Dean glances up. Their eyes lock. Castiel tosses him the sword, and Dean catches it by the hilt. A slow smile breaks over his face.

Then Lucifer comes at them, hissing wildly, and Dean and Castiel run to meet him.

Castiel knocks one of Lucifer's arms aside and rips four long lines open down his chest – beside him, Dean sinks the sword deep into the meat of Lucifer's other arm and it flops down, useless. A shotgun blast from Sam sends Lucifer reeling backward, and Dean jumps forward with the sword swinging and Castiel leaps into the air to come down on Lucifer's back, lacerating his neck. They fight on the very edge of the cliff, slashing and hacking, dodging or suffering Lucifer's blows, claws and teeth, until, finally, Castiel hurls Lucifer to the ground and Dean drives the sword through his throat.

Steam hisses up around the blade as the water mixes with angel blood. Dean, looking exhausted, battered and exhilarated in the creamy glow of dawn, standing less than a foot away from the dropoff, wipes the sweat from his forehead and beams at Castiel. Tentatively, though he hurts in a thousand places, Castiel finds himself smiling back.

Then, with all of his dying strength, one of Lucifer's legs comes up, and with one great slash he tears open Dean's chest and sends him reeling backward off the cliff.

Somewhere behind him, Sam shouts in horror, but Castiel is already in the air, arcing like a bounding otter over the edge of the cliff after Dean. [He catches him above the trees](http://pics.livejournal.com/whisperelmwood/pic/0002hwt7), one foot wrapped around his wrist and the other buried in his jacket, but Dean's weight is too much for his wings and now they're both plummeting down to earth, Castiel flapping frantically, trying to slow them, trying not to drop Dean. They grapple in midair to stay together – Dean's jacket is ripping in Castiel's talons and Dean reaches up for his hand and Castiel reaches down for him. The yellowy cliff face goes blurring past and the trees come rushing up and in front of them there looms a sheer rock ridge, the last barrier between them and the sea.

Castiel strains and his wings burn. The whole of his focus narrows to lifting Dean over the ridge, and the muscles in his wings scream in fury as he commands them to make war on gravity. Dean's feet begin to brush the treetops but Castiel, somehow, impossibly, feeling as though every muscle in his body has been transformed into fire, powers himself and Dean up and over the ridge. The tips of Dean's boots scrape the stone as they pass.

Then they're out over the water, and Castiel tries for a glide, angling toward the wharf, but manages more of a controlled fall toward the surface of the sea.

He sets Dean in the water with a gentle splash, flapping to keep himself in the air. Dean gazes dazedly up at him; Castiel keeps his grip around Dean's wrist and jacket and drags him as he floats on the mild waves toward the small black sailboat that he recognizes from descriptions as Dean's own. It's not far but it's hard work, and by the time Castiel detaches his feet from Dean and lands on deck, he's vaguely hoping never to fly again.

Castiel reaches into the sea and hauls a sopping wet and sputtering Dean on board. Dean manages to wobble his way upright, arch his eyebrow at Castiel, and say “Well, thanks,” before he passes out.

Castiel leaves Dean where he collapsed among his crab traps and fishing nets and rummages around in the cabin until he discovers a dry, soft towel. He clambers back up to Dean, props him up against the stern, cuts off his shirt with his own claws, and applies the towel to the long cut Lucifer left on his chest. Dean's head lolls against _The Impala_ 's railing. He looks cold and wan in the pink dawn light, but the flow of blood is slowing under Castiel's hands.

The sun is halfway above the horizon, turning the skirt of the sky a vivid blue, before Dean finally stirs. His eyes blink open and he stares at Castiel for a long moment, like he thought it might all have been a dream.

“Well, there's a face I never thought I'd see again,” he says.

Castiel gives him a flat, unimpressed stare. Dean laughs weakly, then yelps as the movement hurts his chest. “Ow!”

He settles back against the stern. Castiel moves with him to keep pressure on his wound.

They're quiet for a while, then Dean says, “I think Sam and me, we're going to go back to hunting. That felt damn good, and I probably caught about twenty fish in total living here. It's no contest.”

He slides one of his hands under Castiel's and holds the towel to his chest. Castiel sits back on his haunches. The creaking of the boat as it rocks in the rolling swells fills a long silence, and then Dean sighs and looks at the floor of the boat.

“I'm sorry,” he says.

Castiel cocks his head and hums in consideration. Then, slowly, deliberately, he shakes his head, and offers Dean a quirked eyebrow and a little smile to let him know that it's not because the apology isn't accepted, it's because it isn't needed.

Dean looks surprised, but in the end, he smiles back.

“Dean!” Sam's frantic voice sounds from the other end of the wharf. “Dean, where are you?”

“In the boat, Sammy!” Dean shouts.

Castiel leaps up to the railing of the boat, wings poised for flight. Dean startles. “Hey, wait!” He grabs a rope and pulls himself to his feet. Castiel hesitates, glances over his shoulder.

Dean looks Castiel in the eyes. “I mean it,” he says softly. “Thanks.”

Castiel nods and, as Sam jumps into the boat from the other side, bursts into the air. He skims the waves, kicking up salt spray, then circles high up, watching the two humans in their black boat dwindle away, and flies out over the sea, with the wind in his face and feathers, into the blue, blue sky, headed home.

END.


End file.
